Buckle Your Seat Belt!

Late last week a friend of a friend's son was in a seemingly minor car accident in northern Virginia. He was steering his pickup truck around a corner about a mile from his home. He was sober and not driving extremely fast (maybe 30-40 mph), but apparently took the turn a bit wide. It sounds like he was making a left turn, drifted wide, and the rear passenger wheel of his truck struck the curb. With it's high center of gravity and the angles involved, the truck flipped over.

Now, had he been wearing a seat belt, he likely would have been pretty well banged up -- maybe some bruises and cuts. Unfortunately, he was not buckled in. So as the truck flipped, he was ejected through the windshield (which pops out easily for safety reasons), and he struck the brick wall of house headfirst. In an effort to keep the swelling of his brain from killing him, they had to remove the top of skull to reduce the pressure. Further, about 20% of his occiptal lobe was dead. There was a slight chance of the body healing and his brain regaining some function, but today we heard they have pronounced him brain dead. He probably won't see the end of the week, and may not see the end of today.

He is 21.

There is no excuse for not wearing your seat belt, ever. Accidents happen, which is why they're called accidents. BUCKLE UP.

ZoneAlarm and KB951748 Windows Update

Like many others, applying this update has killed my internet connection. Apparently something in KB951748 upsets ZoneAlarm at which point it blocks all internet traffic. The stupid thing on my part is that I actually read about this in passing somewhere and then went an did an update this morning on my desktop anyway. This is the only machine running ZoneAlarm, so all the other computers in house still could connect which let me research the problem further.

I've never been a huge ZA fan, but like I'm always more comfortable with a program that alerts for both inbound and outbound connection attempts. I've reverted to ZA because they killed off the free version of Tiny Personal Firewall (aka Kiero), at which point I switched to Comodo. But that one wreaked havoc on my internal network traffic (connecting to laptops and the Xbox 360 became painful). So I eventually moved to ZA. Each time you install a new firewall, it goes through several days of training where it questions you about all activity. This is very annoying, so I don't really want to switch from ZA right now. But I need internet on this machine and don't want to be firewall-less.

One option of course is to uninstall KB951748. Do this by opening Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> check "Show Updates". Pick it off the list. The problem is that it warned me all these other updates would stop working too. I don't really want to mess with this system's stability (it's already agining and I don't want to upset it!), so partially uninstalling various updates is one of those things that will surely break other things that are working OK.

Disabling ZA of course lets me back on line, but I feel like a naked teenager stuck in the mall.

So for now I've shut down ZA and turned on the Windows Firewall. I have actually never used this on any of my machines. I know it's better than nothing, but it doesn't warn (or trap?) outbound connections. I'm not sure I feel much better, but it's like throwing a towel to the naked teen in the mall. For now, I'm on line. And really this machine gets abused a lot less than it used too and I haven't noticed any fishy calling home actions via ZA recently anyway, so things should be OK for now.

I'll need to watch for ZA updates or possibly move to something else. Maybe since I don't connect to the Xbox anymore for streaming audio (due to using the HTPC), Comodo is a viable option again. But, ugh, those training days suck.

No more training wheels?

Now that the littlest child has her first real bike, her cries of "I wanna ride my bike" echo through the house every evening and weekend. As such, we've been heading out around the block much more often again (after seemingly taking all of last summer off). But of course now Jake is big enough that he shouldn't need training wheels at all, but watching him ride, he still relies on them. I raised them up, but he would just drop the bike onto one wheel or the other and go down the street -- no concerns for balance (or the noise!) and just merrily relying on the extra wheel.

So we decided that was enough of that and he should be going without training wheels. He's taken to swimming like a little fish (piano lessons too) because he wants to do it. And these past 7 years with him have shown me that whenever he's ready to do something, he just does it. If he's not ready, it's a lot of yelling and pouting and crying and a general uphill battle until we give up, and he decides a month later that he's ready for whatever it was. This is how taking off the training wheels is going. He's afraid to fall, but won't try in the grass because it's too hard to pedal. When you're walking next to him, he just leans against you. I was convinced there was a problem with his bike until I got on it and pedaled around a bit (it's fine). The boy just leans side to side.

After an hour of explaining how the pedals go around in circles and you can't just push downwards, but need to make them go around, and also that nobody can balance on a bike while it's standing still; that it's easier the faster you go, we finally got out on the street. He was so worried about staying near the edge (as is the regular rule when going around the block) that he kept running up into the grass or else panic braking as he'd drift into the street. It wasn't a busy evening, so I convinced him to ignore those rules for now, that I'll watch for cars. Finally he did get going with me jogging along side. I still had to rebalance him several times while going, but at the top level he's finally getting it. He still needs help starting, and stopping, and turning, and balancing. But at least he was out there on two wheels with no support!

I expect he'll progress quickly from here - but it's all up to him.

York Revolution game

We went to see our first Revs game last night. The lost 6-4 against Newark, but it was a fun night out anyway. The kids hung in there through the 6th inning, when they started fading fast as the night wore on after 9 pm. My boy somewhat followed the game, but was often more interested in the various scoreboards and food. My girl of course loved following their big green mascot, DownTown, around the stadium. She had a chance to get on field after the top of the 6th to do some Turkey Hill flag thing where 3 little kids wave flags (pink, brown and white for strawberry, chocolate and vanilla) as colored cows race across the big screen. At this point she was just plain too tired and getting grumpy, so kept declining even though the stadium girls were having trouble finding kids to go down.

Even though we had free tickets, we probably blew through something like $50 to $60 in food and drink, so even though we could afford the season ticket packages, we probably couldn't afford to do that every game! But it was fun and a good experience for the kids. The between inning stuff was fairly interesting, and now I know the whole "thump, revoluSHUUUN, revoluSHUUUN" yell. Also, Pizza Hut sponsored some thing where if #28 on Newark struck out at any point in the game, everyone's tickets would be worth free breadsticks. Sounds like a neat idea, but it can't be fun for the guy, or even the pitcher, as thousands of fans change "breadsticks" at you. He did strike out his third time up though, so I don't feel that bad for the pitcher I guess.

The day started off with a tribute to Brooks Robinson. Apparently he got his start in York in the early 50s. He told a little story about playing second base and a coach making the comment along the lines of "that secondbaseman doesn't have a lot of movement, but he's going to kill your shortstop with those throws". So they moved him to third base half way through the season. The rest is of course history where he made it to the Orioles the next year and became a hall-of-fame third basement, winning 16 consecutive gold gloves. He had his wife and three grand kids there, one of whome was named Brooks (a girl around 15).