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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.

The wife and I have decided to become one with nature. We want to experience the forest and the grass. We want to see the wildlife. We want to sleep under the stars and breathe fresh mountain air. We want a camper.

I know. I know. Some of you may question our techniques but becoming one with nature doesn’t mean you need to light your own fires or wake up with a stick in your back. Being one with nature is having your own potty. Being one with nature is having heat and a toilet. Or maybe not.

The wife and I have used all sorts of arguments to convince ourselves it is a good idea. It costs less than a hotel room (minus the costs of the camper itself, of course). We can take the dog (when he not driving the wife insane). We can go anywhere we want (as if we were somehow restricted before). None of these arguments are as good, or even as true, as the real one: we believe it will be fun — and not just fun for the two of us. It’ll be fun for the whole family.

I should blame the brother-in-law. He really started all of this. I was happy with our tent pitching ways and he had to show us how the other half lives. It’s not like I don’t remember. I spent a large portion of my childhood camping. My parents had a 28 foot camper that was my little playground. Bunk beds housed my brothers and I in the back. My sister got the converted dining room table in the middle and my parents slept in the big bed up front. It wasn’t vacation without loading up the Cadillac and towing that monstrosity somewhere West.

My wife, on the other hand, is in unfamiliar territory. Her family didn’t spend their time on the camping circuit. Our tent is really her first tiny home away from home. This talk of camp fires is more of an adult activity and largely my doing. Her brother was the first in her family to really step up to the camping plate. It turns out we won’t be all that far behind.

See, we’re past the thinking stage. Today, we put our money where our dreams are. We bought a popup camper.

Popup campers aren’t what they used to be. Ours comes with all the features of home. Heat and air conditioning top the list. Heat lets us extend the camping season without losing a limb to frostbite. Air conditioning lets us ignore the summer forecast a bit. I won’t be sleeping in a pool of my own sweat and, more importantly, neither will my child.

The bathroom and shower are next. The bathroom isn’t a necessity for me — I can use a tree — but the wife tends to squat when she pees. Cambell won’t be dressing for a cold trip to the campsite toilet in the middle of the night. That’s a huge relief to all three of us. The shower gives us easy place to find a warm rinse off if the campsite doesn’t provide one and a convenient place to wash the child no matter what the weather.

Probably the coolest feature is that it not only bumps out (the term for the two beds that shoot out the ends of a popup) but it slides out on the side. The whole dinette pushes out to give you floor space, space that can house a pack-and-play if need be (and need be).

Other features just round out the package. The kitchen sports a stove (in addition to a second stove for the outside) and a sink. There’s a ton of storage and even a cable TV hookup, if we really want to forget that were camping.  As far as popup campers go, this one is close to the top of the line.

To say we are excited is an understatement. We’re ready to hook this thing behind the Xterra. We’re ready to hit the road. We have visions of traveling far and wide. We’ll see the world! I tell ya.

Ok, we might start someplace a bit closer, like here or here. But we’ll get out there sometime. We’ll soak in the sun. We’ll visit new places and stay under the trees. And, yes, we might just listen to the light hum of the air conditioning. Ah, nature. Don’t you love it?

To everyone who’s been asking, Cambell is feeling much better. Although I’d hate to jinx it, the pneumonia appears to be behind him now. All that praying paid off handsomely.

The little tike perked up all in one day. He had spent about a week acting lackadaisical and not entirely himself. This past weekend we got him back. His bright smile returned. He spent a full day running around the house doing something other than attempting to digest his latest trickle of snot. Sorry, sad but true.

While I’m counting my blessings, I should say that I’m grateful that Cam has inherited daddy’s sleeping habits when he’s sick. When I’m sick, I want nothing more than sleep. I’ll wake when it’s all over and I’m feeling better. Cam did his fair share of sleep over the past couple of weeks. More importantly, when he did sleep, he slept soundly. Our sleeplessness was more due to stress and a change of location — the wife and I slept on a futon matress in the baby’s room for several days — than a wide-eyed baby. That’s good for all three of us.

His return to health will do a lot for the cabin fever experienced by both the wife and I. Both of us spent time home from work in the last week due to grandmom the babysitter becoming ill — in what looks to be a not-so-unrelated occurrence — and we’re anxious see walls unlike those of our own. We also want to shop. A Very Important Purchase* is coming up and peering through the windows of the internet is no longer salving our appetite.

But we’re mostly happy just to have things get back to normal. Little things, like the good night hugs of tiny arms, are so much sweeter when you aren’t worrying about visiting the hospital.

* – I’ll get to this in a future post. Stay tuned.

Friday’s weather – a wintery mix of cold rain, freezing rain, and more rain – was awful. The sky made little effort to brighten above a low dim. We have these days every winter. Sometimes they wait until March. A cold shower washes away the snow, now more slush than snowman. It’s Mother Nature’s way of rushing things along toward spring. Ignore this damp, bone chilling day. A thaw is on the way.

Still, it wasn’t the cold or the rain that left me shuddering on Friday. It was worry. On Wednesday, we found out that little Cambell had pneumonia and worry lines have peppered the faces of two first time parents ever since. Outside of a nasty little flu late last year, this was the first real illness we’ve encountered with our little one. Words like hospital don’t enter my vocabulary often. On Wednesday, it did.

It all started with a little cough Wednesday morning. Coughs aren’t usually something to worry about and we sent him to the babysitter. During the day it got worse. By the time my wife picked him up, he was wheezing. She went directly to the nighttime pediatrician. I came straight from work to join her.

Cam wasn’t well. His cough had worsened considerably. They ordered an X-ray and I accompanied him to radiology. What awaited me was a little unexpected; I had not thought through the entire process. It turns that they take it for granted that infants won’t exactly sit still for X-rays. Their solution to the problem involved a wooden seat not unlike the child seat we use to feed him dinner. The exception was two clear pieces of hardened plastic which held his body in place, with his arms high above his head. The technician spun him left and right in his medieval torture device as he let his displeasure be known. What was the worst part? The first set of pictures didn’t turn out. We had to do it twice. I don’t know who was more upset, him or I.

Cambell and I returned to my worried wife to wait for the doctor. He had pneumonia. The big question of the day was where we would be sleeping, home or at the hospital. Two other kids that night were already on their way to the hospital. It seems we weren’t the only one dealing with pneumonia. The doctor needed to see how he would respond to her treatments before we knew if those kids would have company.

Three nebulizer treatments followed. He fought us on the first one. He was upset for the second and he collapsed during the third. The effort exhausted him physically and us emotionally. I just kept worrying about resentment. He was in a strange place being forced into situations he was unfamiliar. No one explained this mask being pressed against his face. What was going on? The argument of being “for his own good” sounded hollow to me. Heck, the dentist is for my own good. That doesn’t make me excited to see him.

The doctor took her time deciding what to do with us. The fence was straddled. Eventually, home won out. He had responded to his treatments. I went to grab his prescriptions, one of which included a chamber used to administer inhaler treatments. I was home just before 1:00 am. There were lots of tired folks in the house that night.

On both Thursday and Friday, he returned to his regular pediatrician. On Thursday we were told to continue his medicine. On Friday, the inhaler was replaced by a nebulizer. This time we got to play the home version.

The weekend was filled with visits from the grandparents. Cambell improved over the weekend but his progress has been slow. He is still having nebulizer treatments every four hours but I have to say he’s been really good about them. We set up Bear and the Big Blue house and shove the steaming pipe in his face. He turns it on and watches the screen until we turn it off. When we do, he claps his hands and gets down from the couch. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him how good he is. I think he knows.

On Tuesday, we found out that the nebulizer treatments will continue for a little while but, for those who’ve asked he is getting better. He’s eating good, drinking good, and sleeping good. He’s got plenty of energy and he’ll even pose for a picture or two.

I’m quite proud of how good he’s been through all of this and thankful of all those folks who’ve expressed concern and well wishes for our little one. We’re hoping that we are on the back end of this thing. There’s nothing else that could make the rain go away any faster.

Warning: Lots of geekiness below. Hold on to your hats, or fedoras, if you have them.

This week my blog came under attack and it was a nasty one. The attack was spam related which is no surprise; my blog is frequently home to comments featuring diatribes of penis size and mortgage purchases. What was a surprise was the scale of the attack. This wasn’t just one comment about love in all the hard places. It was more than 150 of them.

In fact, it was one comment for every single blog entry on the site. It wasn’t creative but it definitely was a pain in my ass. The most scraping hemorrhoid was that Movable Type, my blog tool of choice, has no efficient interface for deleting multiple comments across blog entries. I’d have to do this one by one. It could take a while — a long while.

I turned to a friend for assistance while I downloaded the newest version of Movable Type. See, Movable Type isn’t blind to the problem and I’m not the first person to be annoyed. The kind folks who write MT are working on the problem. They are just a little behind the spammers at this point.

One useful weapon already included with MT is IP blocking. Basically, I can stop someone from a specific IP address from posting comments. I’ve already added the IP address of my aggressor. This, however, is far from comprehesive. IP addresses are often handed out dynamically. That is, you get a new one every time you hop onto the internet. Worse, some spammers are already working around this, manually switching IP addresses every time they add another advertisement-laced comment. It’s really only one way to slow down the flood.

Mt-Blacklist is another weapon in the fight and was a lifesaver in light of my problems. It checks each comment in your blog against a large set of expressions that are normally included in spam. From my tests, it seems to do a good job. Even better, it provides an interface to delete the guilty parties all at once. One click and my trash went away. In the future, a tool like this or a bayesian equivalent will almost be required to keep the mosquito-like spammers away.

I’m not as excited about a coming feature of Movable Type that would surely deal with the problem of spam much more efficiently: comment registration. The basic idea is that a blog author could force commenters to register with their site, providing a user name and password of some sort. This provides the ability to screen prospective commenters and provides an extra barrier to the scripts that take advantage of blogging’s open architecture. What doesn’t thrill me is that barriers are placed not just between myself and the spammers; they are placed between my blog and any potential reader with something to say. I get few enough comments as it is. Add a registration progress and my site statistics may be the only way I can tell that anyone at all is even stopping by (you can never be sure that anyone actually reads anything).

It is nice, however, to see the MT’s authors attempting to tackle the problem. In the coming years, the problem of spam must be addressed directly by the tool, not just by an optional plug-in.

Speaking of attacks, I’ve acquired an almost flu like symtom in the last week in the form of a tiny penguin. I’ve suddenly acquired the Linux bug. This isn’t the first time. This seems to happen in regular intervals of about 6 to 9 months. I wake up one day and have a strong desire to acquire the latest distribution. There no warning and, generally, no real reason behind my want. My inner geek must supply my computer with an entirely new system of operation.

So I installed the newest version of Fedora this week. That install was fairly painless but things didn’t work on my first, or second, attempt. I first thought I’d try out Suse Linux. A friend of mine seemed to like it and I’m always up for a new flavor of lollipop – God knows there are nearly the same number of flavors of Linux. It wasn’t happening. Suse doesn’t want to hand you the keys. They want you to download them during installation. This, in my mind, is fine. Every distribution involves some amount of downloading. What isn’t fine is when the base install can’t seem to find the proper drivers for my network card. The math was simple: No network card == no operating system.

My next attempt involved Mandrake 9.2. This would be an upgrade for my second computer. Again, I ran into troubles and, again, it was hardware related. Mandrake 8.0 didn’t like my Logitech MouseMan+. Neither did its younger brother. Some not-so-quality time with XFree86Config convinced me to go another direction.

So, Fedora, Red Hat’s free little cousin is now safely installed. I have to say I’m impressed. Linux makes neat leaps and bounds every time I spend my time away from it. Driver support improves and every new version sports a fancy feature, or fancy widget, I’m glad to see included. It’s almost like watching someone you know lose weight. If you saw them every day, you’d hardly notice. Introduce time and distance and the changes are readily apparent. I now have a new sandbox and I must play.

And play I have. Between the time it took to secure my blog and my new operating system installations, I’ve spent a lot of time in front of the computer fiddling with switches. That’s not surprising in my household but it’s certainly different than doing something more my style, like playing Diablo II.

I’m so ashamed. Along with the wife, I’ve watched the first three episodes of American Idol. Sadly, it was no accident. I actually meant to do so. My excuse centered around the fact that I wanted to see the beginning of the competition. That’s when all the really, really bad singers show up. I thought it would be hysterical. I was not disappointed.

Some of these folks were downright awful. I mean horrible. The biggest train wrecks are by far the most entertaining. Scat girl gave an interesting interpretation of, well, something (dobedowah). The favorite performance of both my wife and I was a rendition of Elvis’s “Faaring in ruff with rue.” It’s just a classic.

Simon, who’s job is to annoy, did it well. He mentions that he feels it is his responsibility to give folks a reality check and he does, in his own signature way. I started the show disagreeing with him. There’s no need to stomp on someone’s hopes. There’s no requirement for him to throw a wrench into someone’s dreams. But then I watched a little more.

Some of the folks need the whipping — need the sarcasm. A lot of contestants are adamant of their ability even though their performance leaves no doubts about their lack of talent. Mom and dad may have you convinced that you are good, great, and wonderful but stick with us here. You aren’t in your living room. You aren’t singing along to the radio. Yikes! And what the hell is with the M.C. Hammer dance?

In any case, I don’t think you can call me a fan of the show; the good singers don’t particularly interest me. However, while these embarrassments are featured I might continue to tune in. You know, just for the giggles.

A surreal thing happened to me last night as I logged into my home computer for some work at 11:00 pm. I realized I wasn’t alone. It seemed that everyone and their mother was doing the same as I: spending a quiet Wednesday evening working in front of their PCs.

My work night started with a little email. Quick replies came from both my project manager and the project tech lead. I sent an IM to a coworker that was mired in tasks to complete. His response made it clear that he wouldn’t be clocking out anytime soon. I assigned a problem to another coworker. A response to the issue was immediate. A little later a software problem report landed on my desk (figuratively, of course). It was entered by one tester and edited by another — all after the stroke of midnight. I was by no means alone. In fact, my virtual workspace was a little crowded.

One interesting aspect of the whole thing was that many of the folks I interacted with that night were in the comfort of their own home. The wonders of telecommuting mean that a view of the office is no longer a requirement of actually performing work. People could contribute their time without having to factor in their actual location and many took advantage of the opportunity.

I can’t say I was surprised — I’ve worked with several of these folks for a while and have no doubts of their dedication to the job — but color me impressed. I didn’t really expect the virtual workplace to work so smoothly and my coworkers again demonstrated why I hold them in high regard. That’s pretty cool and I’m always looking for cool things when 1:00 am is quitting time.

I don’t know about everyone else but I’m sick of hearing about Pete Rose and his troubles with baseball. It seems that every year, normally around Hall of Fame time, he grumbles and the media turns their eye on him. It’s playoff time people. Let’s forget about Pete. We’ve got football to talk about.

This year it’s especially bad, given that he’s finally dropped his version of a bomb. He lied about gambling. You don’t say? Next you’ll tell us that Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman. Uh Pete, got anything else to talk about?

He took 14 years to make the admission — 14 years of bold face lies to his peers, the public, and even an author of a previous biography — and the reasons are pretty obvious. He wants to sell his new book and he wants one last shot at the Hall of Fame, not necessarily in that order.

My personal opinion about Pete’s status in baseball has nothing to do with the Hall. If Rosey Pete is going to be in baseball, there is absolutely no question that he should be in the hall. His play was exemplary.

That said, I don’t believe he deserves to be associated with baseball at all. He committed the ultimate sin in sports: he threw questions — deadly questions — onto the field. Wagering adds a question mark to the end of every play. Why did the outfielder drop that ball? How come the pitcher can suddenly get no one out?

People often talk about the Hall of Fame being about accomplishments on the field. Off the field crimes — be they of personality , drug usage, or even criminal acts — do not factor into the decision. I generally agree. The problem with Pete is his acts did happen on the field of play, rather he bet from the dugout or not. His wagering cannot escape the spirit of his crime. His gambling landed him right where he should be, on the outside looking in.

I’m very much hoping that the commisioner leaves his ass on the bench where he belongs. The only person that would really benefit from Rose being in the hall is Rose himself. It would soften the resolve of a lifetime ban and do nothing but harm the sport of baseball.

A lot of sports writers are of the opinion that, eventually, he’ll get in, despite the fact that this admission has changed more than a couple minds in the opposite direction. I’m hoping they’re wrong. Maybe the commisioner will act like one for a change. But, then again, I wouldn’t bet on it.