{"id":201,"date":"2001-04-21T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-04-22T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2001\/04\/21\/issue-25\/"},"modified":"2001-04-21T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-04-22T06:00:00","slug":"issue-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2001\/04\/21\/issue-25\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 25"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"header\">\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"90%\">\n<tr>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"35%\">April 22, 2001<\/td>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"31%\" align=\"center\">Issue 25<\/td>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"33%\" align=\"right\">Lehi, Utah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<h2>In this issue:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"#abuse\">Child Abuse<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#game-over\">Game Over<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#home\">It&#8217;s Home Now<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<h2><a name=\"abuse\" id=\"abuse\"><\/a>Child Abuse<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">Eric (22 APR 2001)<\/p>\n<p>Violence, especially when involving a child, is an ugly thing. I can vouch for that first-hand. My children have been abusing me a fair amount lately.<\/p>\n<p>The trend started when Ethan and I were wrestling one morning. I guess it had been a while since we had clipped his fingernails (that would be a whole different wrestling match), because he recognized them for their apparent combat potential. He dragged a fingernail from the base of my neck to the middle of my sternum. Without exaggeration, a strip of my skin dangled from the end of his finger.<\/p>\n<p>Something in my face inspired him to an immediate <i>sincere<\/i> apology. The shower sure stung that morning, and I looked like I was recovering from surgery for a few days.<\/p>\n<p>Gerrit, not one to be upstaged, pretty much took over from there. Aside from being the general King of Destruction in our home, he also does his share of harm.<\/p>\n<p>Not long ago, while Shannon was holding him to me for a kiss goodnight, he thought a head-butt-to-the-eye goodnight would be much more fun.<\/p>\n<p>But his magnum opus so far was a time when I was asleep. It&#8217;s not often that I&#8217;m asleep when he&#8217;s out of his crib, but for some reason, that was the situation. He climbed up on the bed, and I groggily noticed something cold and metallic rubbing on my upper arm. I thought, <i>Oh, Gerrit is driving one of his little cars on my arm<\/i>, and I just tried to keep sleeping.<\/p>\n<p>When he went over to visit Shannon (also sleeping), she woke with a start to find Gerrit with a razor in his hand. The connection still didn&#8217;t quite make it through my head, until I got up later to find a raw patch on my arm that had bled in a few places.<\/p>\n<p>I do have to say, though, that in Gerrit&#8217;s case he distributes the beatings evenly. We&#8217;ve all learned that when you sword fight with Gerrit, it&#8217;s a very practical exercise in self-defense. He even gets himself sometimes. Just yesterday he stepped off a mattress and in a stumbling, running attempt to regain his balance, smacked right into a wall. That&#8217;s one of those dichotomous experiences where you try to show sufficient comforting sympathy while stifling a giggle.<\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"game-over\" id=\"game-over\"><\/a>Game Over<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">Eric (01 MAR 2001)<\/p>\n<p>A very sad e-mail hit my inbox a couple of weeks ago. Seeing the subject line, &#8220;Game over for Gamecenter,&#8221; my heart sank a little.<\/p>\n<p>Gamecenter is one of the web sites I visited most regularly. Their &#8220;Dispatch&#8221; that shows up in my work inbox brought a bit of stolen pleasure each week as I peeked at the computer game reviews. The best reviews are for games that I&#8217;ve greatly anticipated (knowing about them from previous Gamecenter previews), and for games that really stink. The latter are always good for a laugh. In fact, I doubt I&#8217;ve played any games over the past few years that I didn&#8217;t first get a good recommendation for from Gamecenter.<\/p>\n<p>And now they&#8217;re gone. The dot com shakeout finally impacted me in a personal way. Sure, several of the free ISPs I&#8217;ve used have dropped like flies as I kept changing from one to the next (though NetZero remains in business; they just take their fee in blood instead of dollars &#8212; they get more obnoxious every week). I&#8217;ve also gotten e-mails from several other free services as they crashed and burned. But this was the first one to hurt a little.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that Gamecenter didn&#8217;t go bust &#8212; their parent company, through acquisitions, ended up with two gaming\u00a0 web sites. One of them had to go, and pink slips to the Gamecenter staff announced which one.<\/p>\n<p>Their last feature on the site was a list of bios for all the writers and editors. Each name was followed by a sadly ironic little button: &#8220;add to cart&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"home\" id=\"home\"><\/a>It&#8217;s Home Now<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">Eric (22 APR 2001)<\/p>\n<p>Every now and then, someone will ask us, &#8220;So, are you all settled in your new house?&#8221; I usually respond, &#8220;Yeah, pretty much,&#8221; which is the socially expected &#8220;I&#8217;m fine, thanks&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>But really I wanted to say, &#8220;It&#8217;s never home until I&#8217;ve got a place for my computer.&#8221; Of course, you can&#8217;t say that for fear of being considered not only a total geek, but ungrateful for such a nice new house.<\/p>\n<p>When we bought the house, the &#8220;no place for an office&#8221; flaw was immediately apparent, but there was a whole lot of space in the basement to remedy that.<\/p>\n<p>We started the remedy in January, and hoped to be done near the end of February. Unfortunately, it was the classic over-schedule, over-cost project. It caused lost sleep, tough choices and was highly educational. The adage comes to mind that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, after all that, I was finally able to resurrect my desk from its dusty and partially disassembled\/destroyed state last week. Over the past few days, I got my computer set up. I was especially anxious to do this since I had gotten a high-speed internet connection hooked up about a month ago, and hadn&#8217;t been able to use it.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, when I finally got all the hardware hooked up, I couldn&#8217;t get a connection. I went through hours of technical support music, with lots of suggested tweaks, apologies about hardware incompatibilities and finally stumped support people. I was starting to suspect software rot &#8212; my OS had stopped shutting down cleanly a while back, and was getting a bit cluttered with junk.<\/p>\n<p>On a gamble, I installed a clean version of Windows XP, which I have been beta testing at work. I knew that no support technician would touch me with a ten foot pole after that, but hey, I figured I had exhausted their expertise anyway. Besides, I&#8217;d grown to like XP from using it at work. So, I installed it, and <i>everything just worked!<\/i> I felt like a Mac user for a moment, though not quite so &#8220;artsy&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So here I type in a new office, on a new operating system, with a new high-speed link to the &#8216;net. And if all goes well, this issue will even be published on an advertisement free new host.<\/p>\n<p>And even though my office isn&#8217;t totally finished, I&#8217;m starting to think, &#8220;Yeah, this is feeling like home.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"photo\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/office-setup.jpg\" width=\"349\" height=\"282\" \/><br \/><span class=\"caption\">New Office in Progress<\/span><br \/> April 22, 2001<\/p>\n<div class=\"footer\">\n<p class=\"copyright\">Copyright \ufffd <a href=\"mailto:ericsmith@email.com\">Eric Smith<\/a>, 2001, All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>April 22, 2001 Issue 25 Lehi, Utah In this issue: Child Abuse Game Over It&#8217;s Home Now Child Abuse Eric (22 APR 2001) Violence, especially when involving a child, is an ugly thing. I can vouch for that first-hand. My children have been abusing me a fair amount lately. The trend started when Ethan and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2001\/04\/21\/issue-25\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Issue 25&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-familynews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1770,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}