Poor LTJ… we lived together long enough before getting married that he had to know what he was getting in to, but I still don’t envy him dealing with me in the mornings. Anyone who has ever tried to get me up can sympathize with LTJ’s plight. At our wedding, my mom happily handed the torch off to him.

Here’s a funny incident from this morning (last night I told him to try to wake me up early… hahaha):

LTJ: Trying to wake Miss Possible up.
Miss Possible: Fighting not to get up
LTJ: I don’t know how I’m supposed to wake you up, if you don’t want to. You ask me to wake you up, then you yell at me. What am I supposed to do??
Miss Possible: Leave me the F alone! Go read the documentation and leave me alone!!!
LTJ: Read the documentation on what?
Miss Possible: Stop asking me how to do things, and just go read the documentation for yourself!

Later today my wonderful husband wants to confirm that I got up and reiterates to me this lovely story. His final words on the subject: Would you care to write said documentation?

I guess I was having a nightmare about all the documentation I wrote last night ;-)

The sad thing is this isn’t even close to the worst of these wake up stories.

LTJ and I learned a valuable lesson this week: emergency vet visits are costly and we need a Visa card.

Bogart all better

Bogart first vomited Tues. night around 11 pm and then again in the morning with LTJ. Throughout the day anytime he ate or drank anything he vomited and it was coming out a frothy yellow bile. By the time LTJ got home, we were ready to bring Bogart to the vet but the only thing open at that hour is the emergency hospital in Palo Alto. We were there for about 3 hours while they poked and prodded our furry little baby. They did blood tests, x-rays, and fecal tests and couldn’t find anything wrong with him. The vet was very nice and said that from the x-rays it looked like there was a lot of air in his intestines, a sign that something he ate had irritated his stomach. Since he’s such a huge fan of other dog’s poop, maybe it was that. It could’ve been a snail. We were worried that he ate a mushroom as it’s the season for them here but all his blood work was normal. They gave him an injection of fluids and sent us home with some medications for anti-vomiting and diarrhea.

I was betting the bill would be $350 and Brandon wasn’t sure. It ended up being $548… all to find out that there was essentially nothing wrong with him.

And of course, they don’t take American Express or Discover Card so I had to use my debit. Imagine if there had been something seriously wrong and it cost even more! So lesson learned, we need a card that is accepted everywhere for these types of emergencies.

Bogart was great for the vet though. The doctor said he was the perfect patient and didn’t put up any stink about all the poking and prodding they did to him.

Admittedly as new parents, we probably jumped to bring Bogart to the vet (and hence needed to go the emergency room) faster than others would but with a puppy that’s vomiting it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.

I’m happy to say that Bogart is all better now and back to snacking on all his usual treats. He was so thrilled to be given some of his favorite treats again as he hadn’t had them in so long. We are walking him on the 6′ leash again rather than a flexi-leash so that we can keep him closer and away from anything nasty that might make him sick again. If it’s within our control, we’d like to avoid shelling out 500 bucks again.

We have posted some new pics of Bogart. I just bought him a hat yesterday. He looks so cute in it! Also, the ones from the beach are pretty funny. Here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thediatribe/

Check out this Flash game:
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_flash/jeu_chiant.swf

It’s highly amusing and frustrating at the same time.

The site is in French, but no matter. Just click on the JOUER link and you’ll get the hang of the game in no time.

Good luck and let me know what you think!

My best time was 22 seconds. I’m sure someone else can do better. Post your best time!

This was the first Christmas that LTJ and I spent together and I have to say, for someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, LTJ sure had some concerns about the lack of Christmas spirit in our house.

Christmas weekend LTJ complained to me that “it doesn’t really feel like Christmas.” We didn’t have any decorations out, because all of mine are for a Christmas tree which he is pretty opposed to. I was beginning to feel there was a double standard going on.

The next comment was that he wanted it to smell like Christmas in the house and wouldn’t it be great if we had some Christmas cookies. I made some yummy sugar cookies which helped fill the house with the holiday scents.

He also wanted Christmas music going. Now this was something that really blew me away, because so many Christmas songs have a direct religious tie to Christianity and as a Jew I wouldn’t think LTJ would want to listen to someone ringing the praises of the birth of Jesus. Of course, he believes Jesus was born and was a great leader, just not that he was the son of God. I think it’s a minor point of difference, but one that seems to have caused so much hoopla and conflict around the world.

LTJ found a special channel on TV that was just a burning log with Christmas music on. He was especially impressed by the fact that occasionally you would see a hand reach in and add a log or poke the fire. For the entire weekend, every time I switched the channel and came back into the living room, this log channel was back on again. LTJ was really psyched when he found a high-def version of the log, because what’s better than a burning yule log in HD? And I swear, the crystal clarity of the burning embers and flames really made it feel like there was a fireplace in our living room…

A persistent issue over the weekend was that I hadn’t wrapped his presents yet. I don’t know why it was of such concern to him as of course I was going to wrap them. But he was really concerned that I wouldn’t wrap them in time and he really wanted to open his presents. To be fair, I was dilly dallying on this, but there was a lot going on with our new puppy Bogart.

This hyper-concern over the holiday spirit and Christmas was all rather comical to me since he seemed to care more about celebrating Christmas than I did! Growing up LTJ and his family would go to their neighbors on Christmas eve and it was always filled with the scents, sights, and sounds of the holidays… I guess that’s where the holiday spirit got engrained into his psyche.

So while he doesn’t want us to get a Christmas tree, for all intents and purposes he is celebrating Christmas in every other way than the religious aspect. And really I don’t think a tree has any religious ties, so maybe next year I can convince him to get one and then it really will feel like Christmas in our house.

I recently needed to tackle the problem of detecting pop-up blockers for my job. While I found some useful information through Google search, many of the code examples did not work in all scenarios and were focused on opening an arbitrary window just to close it to then see if the pop up window was blocked. In real world scenarios, you often want to detect that a newly opened window was blocked — without closing it — so that you can then take some useful action on the blocked event, like say using location.href to redirect to the appropriate URL.

I thought it would be useful to others to post my version of pop up blocking here. I have tested this code on Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. It works in IE with Yahoo!, Google, MSN, or AOL toolbar’s pop-up blockers.

<script type="text/javascript">
function checkOpenWindow (openWin, keepFocus)
{
    var exists = false;
    if (openWin && !openWin.closed)
    {
        exists = true;
        try {
            openWin.focus();
        }
        catch (e) {
            keepFocus = false;
            exists = false;
        }
        if (!keepfocus)
        {
            window.focus();
        }
    }
    if (!exists)
    {
        alert("The window you attempted to open was blocked");
        // do something here
    }
    else
    {
        alert("Your window successfully opened");
        // generally do nothing
    }
}

var popupWin = window.open('http://www.thediatribe.net/', 'popupName', 'width=500,height=500,toolbars=no');
checkOpenWindow(popupWin);
</script>

An explanation:

• The popupWin variable provides a reference to the window opened through window.open. Storing the return value of window.open is the only method JavaScript provides for accessing the opened window. The return value of window.open may be null.
• The checkOpenWindow function contains the logic to determine if the popup window was successfully opened. I have included a keepFocus parameter here (described further down). You could easily extend the function to provide callbacks for handling when the window exists or does not exist.
• The most basic check is to determine if the openWin parameter is not empty.
• The window object has a closed property that will return true if the window has been closed.
• Some popup blockers, especially the toolbar ones, close the window in such a way that the window’s closed property returns false even though the window has been blocked. As a final check, we try to call the focus method on the openWin. If that fails, then the window was blocked.
  
  window.focus() is called to revert the focus to the parent window. If the keepFocus parameter is set to true, the focus will not be reverted. However, if the opened window does not exist the focus is always reverted.
• I have seen many code samples online that use a setTimeout to determine if the window has been blocked for Yahoo! toolbar. In that approach, you do not need to focus the opened window, however, I have found that the only way to properly detect popup blocking from the AOL toolbar is to attempt to focus the opened window.

Well, as we know, there is one known that we now know – there are still other unknowns in known parts of the country – but this we know: with Rumsfeld there will be no more unknowns as he is now known to be no more and we no longer need to worry over his known knowns, known unknowns, and the ones he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

The above is my fond toodaloo to Rumsfeld. I thought it fitting to write a farewell that made as much sense as he often did:

“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

John Lister, spokesman for the campaign, which strives to have public information delivered in clear, straightforward English, said: “We think we know what he means. But we don’t know if we really know.”

And just so we’re perfectly clear, please DO let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Last weekend I drove back to Mass for my cousin Amy’s bachelorette party and my friend Jodi’s bridal shower. In this short weekend, I managed to see domestic abuse and the cops, attend a car show, meet a Massachusetts state senator, and dance on a stripper pole. Did I enter the Twilight Zone? No, just Western Mass.

I hit the road after 9 pm on Friday after dropping LTJ at Captain and Mrs Larby’s for their summer shingdig (sorry I missed it!). As I drove past the sign for Monson, I was waxing nostalgic on my childhood days. Some of you Diatribers dispute the existence of Monson, but I can assure you it is real. Whether or not it’s part of the Twilight Zone is another story.

I ended up hitting Palmer at 1:30 am and went to the local hangout to meet my cousin Melanie as it was just after last call.

Now that I have moved on from the backwoods of Western Mass, I hate to make generalizations, but I have to admit after the bar scene that greeted my eyes, I was very happy that I no longer live out there and have that for my Friday night excitement. It was a depressing mish mash of poofy hair and white wife beater tank tops. I scene of boredom and repetition, as I know all those people are there every Friday night of their life, unless they are making the “big trip” out to Springfield to party. And I hate to use the word “white trash” but let’s face it, that’s probably the most accurate way to sum it all up. At the very least these people are trapped in a dimension of time, the land that time forgot… I was starting to wonder if maybe I really was in the twilight zone.

Melanie’s first words to me were along the lines of “we need to get Sonya out of here. she’s wasted and starting fights.” Come to find out, she’s starting fights with the girl who hooked up with her boyfriend when they were broken up. Now, I was really feeling back home… as a similar scenario occurred another time I was home over a year ago and in that one a girl jumped me…

I followed Melanie driving Sonya’s car back to Ware (not Where?). We arrive at Sonya’s boyfriend’s house just as my phone rings. It’s LTJ and I say I have to run as we’ve just arrived. Before we hang up he warns me not to get into any fights (also referring to the time I was jumped in Ware). I laugh. How could that possibly happen tonight?

Fast forward a few minutes and suddenly Sonya is outside the house shouting at this girl that was there. Then Sonya’s boyfriend goes outside and is yelling at Sonya. The next thing I know he’s shoved her against the car and is pulling her by her hair. I am watching in shock, eyes wide. She runs into her car and he’s screaming something about how she hit the back of his car and he escalates into a severe ‘roid rage. He jumps into the passengers side of her car and is grabbing her by the throat. I run over to the driver’s side (the window is down) and I yell at him “If you don’t let her go right now, I am going to call the cops.” During the pause, Sonya punches him in the face a few times, jumps out of the car, and starts walking down the street.

We all go back in the house and he is yelling at me about how I threatened to call the cops on him. I respond by saying that no matter what she did he had her by the throat. He says I can leave his house. I say gladly and leave with the words “you people are all crazy.”

As Melanie is giving me the directions to get back to her mom’s house, two cop cars arrive at the house. In this close-knit town Melanie knows the cops and assures them that she will smooth over the situation.

Senator Stephen Brewer
Laughs at “the Internet is just a bunch of tubes”

So yes, LTJ, in a little under 30 minutes, I managed to get into a fight and see the cops. Nothing like being home.

The next day I meet Melanie and we go to this local ice cream stand / burger joint to grab food. The place is packed with hot rods. We have just landed ourselves in the middle of a car show.

While we are waiting for our food, this older man approaches us and introduces himself as Joe Schmoe, actually his name is Stephen Brewer, a Massachusetts state senator. He asks where we live and what we do. He says “Oh, I don’t know that much about computers or the Internet” to which I could not help myself but to reply, “Oh, the Internet is just a bunch of tubes.”

Saturday night is Amy’s bachelorette. We are in the middle of nowhere, Hardwick at my aunt’s and the party bus is late to arrive. The driver had a hard time finding it, surprise surprise. On the party bus, there was a pole and we made each girl dance on it…

So no, I was not literally stripping, just dancing.

I am poking my head out of the rabbit hole to make this post… I feel I owe an explanation for my absence, but I got nothing. At work, I don’t have time to surf/read anything and when I get home, I really don’t want to be on the computer. Plus, I’ve had nothing good to write. All of my posts have always been commuting related and I felt that was getting a little lame.

Alas, when I finally have something good to write it’s once again about something that happened during my commute. You might start to think that the only things I do are work and commute… I guess that isn’t too far from the truth.

I had just come off the escalator at Grand Central onto the 7 train platform and an older gentleman approached me and asked for the time in broken English. I rummaged in my bag for the cell phone and gave him the time. He then attempted to slip something into my work bag. I was confused and grabbed for it. He mumbled something about take it or read it. I walked away and later read it, which you can see on the right.

On the front, a Leslie Hutchinson – Pianista

That has to be the most interesting, pre-meditated pick-up attempt I have ever seen, if that’s what it was. The man walks around with this card… how many of them I wonder… uses a diversion, ‘do you have the time’ to slip a woman the card. I will not be calling POUR CAFE, no matter how relatively sensible the man may be. Obviously, anyone who hands out cards to pick up women is definitely only relatively sensible.

They say New York is the city of cities, too small to be a country, too large to be a town. The city of possibilities. The city of everything. The city of right angles and tough, damaged people. The city of wakeful dreaming, fortunate accidents, random meetings and sudden engagements. New York is the city of the 20th century.

I have to admit that I haven’t experienced much of this yet. But alas, this is the world according to Google and so NYC according to The Muse Hotel, Amazon, New York Safety and Survival Guide, Lyrics007, the Michigan Land Use Institute, all and all a motley crue (fine, it’s really crew, but I can’t help one 80s reference in this entry).

Of course, what I have experienced is that New York is the city of smokers, and more specifically walking smokers.

LTJ and I were recently discussing this phenomenon. No where have I seen more people walking and smoking than in NYC. They are everywhere at all times of day, but most annoyingly on the way into work.

My morning pace could be described as just one notch below running. I weave through the jammed sidewalks and subway stations like a race car driver on the edge, willing to do anything to reach the finish line first. People who think they are walking fast in the tunnel between Port Authority and Times Sq drop their jaw in disbelief when I breeze past them on the left quickly darting into the oncoming melee to slide back into my lane just in time to avoid a head on collison. No joke.

There is a fine art to the New York commute and most mornings I am on my game. There are only a few things that can gum up the works:

1) People parked in the fast lane: Yes, New York is full of tourists and none of them seem to realize that the left lane is the fast lane and if you are either slow or stopped you better get in the right OR ELSE. This rule applies to escalators, subway tunnels and sidewalks.

2) People with broken tail lights who pull the e-brake: Do not stop immediately after a turnstile, escalator, subway door, or subway platform. Not only is this extremely frustrating, it can also lead to serious accidents. Wake up people!

3) Inconsiderate riders who enter the train while people are still exiting: This is also very dangerous. In fact, one time the subway doors closed on me while I was trying to exit because people pushed me in while entering. I had to force the doors open to escape and it left black marks on me. NYC subway waits for no one!

4) Walking smokers: As I previously mentioned, I walk as fast as possible to work. One of the worst things is getting stuck behind a smoker. Not only am I breathing in lungfuls of air, they are full of smoke. I’m seriously starting to think that banning smoking from the streets wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Gosh, why do I always write about commuting? Anyone?

Brandon and I went to see Willy Wonka a few weeks ago, in Times Square at the AMC 25, hands down best movie theater ever. It’s got great roomy seating where the seats really lean back. It’s stories and stories high. And you can go outside onto balconies that overlook Times Sq. Atomsphere, digital, surround sound, roomy. Nuff said.

How cool is it that we can hop on a bus right outside our house and be in Times Sq in 15 minutes?

Across the street from the AMC is a Loews. Next door is Madame Toussaud’s wax museum. And a million flashing lights and huge ad screens and people and noise and sheer crazy mayhem. Lots of tourists too, all of us.

On to Johnny. I’ve always loved him. His work. His personality. His looks. He appeals to me on so many levels from the types of roles he plays, always on the fringe or edge. But he just continues to impress.

Sure I can’t compare this Willy Wonka to the original. I mean I’m not 10 anymore. The first Wonka came out in 1971. I was born in ’78. Does that mean I grew up with Charlie and the amazing chocolate factory? Certainly. As far back as I can remember it was one of my favorite movies, and it has remained so. I’ve seen it countless times. That and the Goonies. We made my mom rent it every week. I’ll never know why she didn’t just buy it as she spent a small fortune renting that movie. Every Friday, we would go to the movie store and we could get anything. Week after week, we chose the Goonies. We were addicted. It was our time down here with the truffle shuffle.

So I don’t think you can really compare the two, and honestly they please in ways that the other fails so its all good.

Veruca Salt’s extreme brattiness was so fresh in the original. Who ever heard of a schnozberry? Perfect. I love when they lick the wall and its candy. I also love the 3-course meal scene. Violet you’re turning Violet.

The special effects in the new one add a new level of coolness. And I think the creep in Depp’s Wonka works well. But who can beat Gene Wilder’s singsong Wonka? Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it…

Any Tim Burton movie will be visually stunning. Eye candy. And I think Depp fits with that, with his chameleon abilities.

The audience seemed to like Burton’s take on the Oompa Loompahs. Personally, I was a bit disappointed. To much spoof for the laughs, for my tastes. Kinda chintzy.

But there were some nice touches. Like when all the kids leave the factory and they’re irrevocably, magically changed.

What continues to impress me about Johnny Depp is the range of his roles and how he always morphs himself to the role. Certainly, I picked up various elements of his former selves in Wonka, a little Scissorhands, a bit Hunter S.

Every time I see him, it’s in a movie I enjoy. Edward Scissorhands. Fear and Loathing. Chocolat. Cry Baby (don’t laugh). Benny and Joon. Sleepy Hollow. Blow. From Hell. Pirates. Finding Neverland, which I just saw and was so touching. I look forward for more to come.