Old Stone FTW

Mrs. At Home and I had a date last night. We dropped the kids off with our very good friends who have lots of people left on their doorstep on Friday night, and we headed off to Belmont, NC for dinner. I had seen pics from the place before, and the restaurant came heavily recommended by my friends. We went to Old Stone in Downtown Belmont.

Before I get to the restaurant, I have to go into location a bit. I followed the Google Maps directions (or so I thought) from our friends' home to Old Stone, but instead of ending up in downtown Belmont, we ended up in downtown McAdenville. So we got on the iPhone, re-calibrated, and got on the way. Note to self: visit downtown McAdenville sometime - some VERY cool new homes near there. We finally got into downtown Belmont. Note to self: visit downtown Belmont sometime. While there was plenty of parking to walk around beautiful downtown Belmont, there was very little parking near Old Stone - it was rainy, so people were there for steak and not a visit to Belmont - although from the bit we saw, it's a beautiful little downtown to walk around.

Mrs. At Home got our names in - they would not take reservations for parties of fewer than six. I did not investigate call-ahead seating. At 7:00 on a Friday night, they estimated the wait at about 30 minutes, which is not unreasonable at all. However, there's very little seating in the bar area. It was raining, so we were stuck just sitting on a bench - which was fine, I had Mrs. At Home with me. But if it were any other company, this would be the only complaint I have for the place. There's not much seating in the bar area, and they don't give you buzzers, so if you have to wait, there's not a good chance of exploring beautiful downtown Belmont during the wait.

After being seated, we glanced at the menu, but it didn't take long for the waitress to come with the specials. Mrs. At Home ordered a 10 oz. New York Strip, and I ordered the 20 oz. bone-in rib eye, which was on special for the night. If you're interested in the wine list, all I can really say is that they do indeed have one, there are lots of words on it, and the prices seem to be reasonable as compared to other places. But I don't know much about wine, so the swill they're peddling could be the leftover hooch from other places. Mrs. At Home ordered a Merlot that she enjoyed very much.

When you order a steak there, you get a salad while you wait - which is not unusual. It's a wedge salad, which ordinarily is translated "salad for the lazy sous chef", but Old Stone does it right. Mrs. At Home was well pleased when she discovered the "cheese" on her salad (she hates cheese on her salad) was not cheese after all, but shoestring potatoes. As I said, wedge salad generally means a lazy sous chef, but that was not the case this time around. It's like they had syringes and carefully injected the dressing into every crevice of the wedge because the salad was not overwhelmed with dressing, but there was not a dry portion of it. They top the salad with shoestring potatoes (as mentioned to the delight of Mrs. At Home), carrots, a couple of cherry tomatoes, and dried cranberries. Very, very tasty. The salad alone is worth the trip (but not worth the price of a full meal).

Mrs. At Home got a baked sweet potato with her meal, which was topped with honey butter, brown sugar, and marshmallows. I got the standard baked white potato. Mrs. At Home was well-pleased with her sweet potato, but the baked potato was average - but I don't go to a steakhouse for potatoes, I go for steak.

I can't say anything for Mrs. At Home's steak, but mine was fantastic. They did this one Chicago style, so it was a true medium (pink all through, no real red), but the outside was well-seared. They're evidently using a very hot grill. They top the steaks with herbed butter, which seems to be the norm these days, and to which I cannot complain. The steak was done perfectly for my liking, and tasted very, very good. Still that hearty, beef flavor to it, just accented by the charring on the outside. (I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it.)

While it's certainly not in our budget to go there weekly or anything, it was well less than Mrs. At Home and I normally would spend "back in the day" at a steak restaurant. It was about 25% less expensive than what we would spend at a Ruth's Chris (which I'm not really that fond of), where we share a "porterhouse built for two". We each had our own steak, side, and salad, and Mrs. At Home had a glass of wine, and it was very affordable. Clearly, it's not the best steak I've had, but it's certainly one of the best steak meals I've had at that price point. If you're in Dallas, and you have money to burn, visit Chamberlain's in Addisson. In Charlotte, it seems the only steak that does well is chain, so you're stuck with Ruth's Chris (meh) or Morton's (blech). I'd say if you want to dress down a bit and save a couple of bucks for dessert or coffee afterward, Old Stone in Belmont is well worth the trip.

Chris

First, go subscribe to Chris' blog. You did it? Good.

Chris is a guy I went to college with. I actually met Chris when I was a snotty-nosed high-school kid, and he (rightly) made fun of me. When you're in college, all high-school kids deserve to have their fun made of. I believe I said some really dumb things at that first meeting, and he remembered those. All the way through college.

Then when we were in college, he taught me a lot about percussion - directly, and about perseverance and dedication, and how there's really no such thing as talent - indirectly. I wasn't a very good performer in college (what's changed?) and so I didn't qualify for the best ensembles my first semester. My second semester, I qualified for the best ensembles, and Chris was one of my mentors - he taught me the philosophy of percussion as a color instrument, and not a rhythm instrument. (I don't think he used those words). Then he taught me about dedication and perseverance the following summer when I had an inkling he thought he could skate through the next semester's auditions. And I didn't. I became the principal in the Wind Ensemble, not because I was the better percussionist, but because I practiced the audition material day and night for weeks. Chris sight-read it - and why shouldn't he - I wasn't talented, and he knew the audition material already.

This made Chris mad, and I was still snot-nosed, high-strung, wound-too-tight, nervous, and a bad percussionist. So Chris made a point of reminding me. I needed the reminder. Some people thought it wasn't nice. Some people thought it was funny. I thought I should loosen up more and practice more and keep my mouth shut. We've talked about that incident a couple of times since then. I forgive Chris. I needed the kick in the pants. Chris is still sorry. I think he needs a kick in the pants now.

Later on in college, Chris and I got to be a little better pals. I still looked up to him, kinda' like the chihuahua looks up to the bulldog in the Looney Tunes episodes. He worked on a crew that I led, but don't tell anybody - I just made out the schedule and bossed people around. I wasn't a leader. But Chris and I got to talk more during this time, and they were good times.

Over time, after I got married and Chris didn't, we just had little in common that we knew. We didn't talk much. During the time I've not talked to Chris, I've learned that the things that were important to me then just aren't that important at all. Lately, because of technology, I've been able to get back in touch with Chris. He married the girl he was dating in college - which made me happy. He has two kids, which also makes me happy. He counts on Jesus Christ as his Lord, which makes me very, very happy.

But now, even though we've not talked much, Chris is still teaching me. I don't get too emo very often - I'm not a 90's kind of guy, and generally don't see it as being necessary to show my feelings or get in touch with my inner child. But Chris has a tumor. It's probably not malignant, but it's a tumor. In his back. It's wrapped around a very large nerve. It's going to require surgery. He's scared. He's not ashamed to say it. He wants you to pray for him. He's facing a reality that Christians have a hard time with. We're supposed to be eager to see Jesus for all of eternity. But we have wives and kids. And a whole bunch of questions of what happens if.....

So, please pray for Chris. Pray lots of things:

• Give God praise that He's sovereign over tumors, spines, nerves, doctors, and medicine
• Pray that he won't die
• Pray that the doctors have skill
• Pray that the doctors have wisdom, and Chris' best interests in mind
• Pray that Chris won't be nervous, but to depend on God for the whole thing
• Pray for Chris' wife and two boys - that they'll be a blessing and encouragement to Chris, and he to them
• And give thanks to God for putting Chris in my life. Give thanks that Chris taught me a bit about percussion, and a lot about humility. And that it's okay for a guy to be scared

Just Plain Practical (JPP) - Cleaning Mighty Mouse Poop

I have a bluetooth Mighty Mouse and I love it. The scroll ball is very handy, the touch-sensitivity is pretty functional, and it's ergonomic enough for as little as I use the mouse (certainly makes more functional sense than the round hockey puck mouse where you couldn't tell which way to hold it). However, it has one problem - dirt often gets lodged in the scroll ball in such a way that scrolling will fail in one or more directions.

I followed Apple's recommendations on how to clean Mighty Mouse (notice the lack of the "the" article before Mighty Mouse - an Apple idiosyncrasy I'm not particularly fond of - it's a device, not a pet!), and followed a bunch of forum recommendations on it. Often I would manage to get whatever was dislodged by normal cleaning, or turning Mighty Mouse upside down and aggressively cleaning with a lightly dampened cloth. Few solutions worked for long and this weekend, down scrolling (the one direction I scroll the most) stopped working entirely. I tried and tried and tried to get it working, but could not.

I was looking on the forums again today to see if people had said that newer Mighty Mouse revisions might have solved this problem. It's expensive as mice go, but I like it enough that if they could correct that one problem (and the touch sensitivity of squeezing) I'd certainly get another. I had no such luck. But I did see a solution for cleaning the scroll ball I had not seen before.

Instead of just wiping or rolling the scroll ball with a lint-free cloth, try this - get a clean sheet of white paper and place it on a table. Turn Mighty Mouse over and roll the scroll ball vigorously over the paper in circles - both directions - wax on, wax off, paint-a-fence - up and down, paint-a-house - left and right. This dislodged whatever dirt was causing the issue and it's just like new. Thanks to the people who posted to the forum and Mr. Miyagi!

Rednecks!

Please note that this post is about rednecks. It's not about hillbillies, sodbusters, hicks, yokels, or bumpkins, or Texas A&M Aggies (and just so everybody knows, any time Aggies hear somebody mention Aggies, they have to yell "woop!" - no matter the circumstances, even if it's a funeral - so expect a couple of those in the comments).

In the past, I didn't care for rednecks. I'm not a redneck and didn't grown up in redneck fashion. And then there was the whole Jeff Foxworthy thing that really confused rednecks with people who just aren't bright - and there's a big difference. As with cornfed midwesterners and yankees (I fit in both categories), the cultural background of the person and their intelligence are mutually exclusive. (Don't worry - the last sentence won't insult any Aggies - there are three-syllable words in there.) In short, because of popular culture, I had been given the idea that "redneck" is synonymous with "dim"

Then through an odd set of circumstances at work, I saw about this guy who was hacking a father of the year contest on the Gastonia Gazette. (Gastonia is where the Charlotteans like to keep the rednecks). A well-known hacker had recently released an article about hacking a dog-show (and losing to somebody who had a better hack), and so it piqued my interest. I read the article on why the guy's kids were voting for him, and it turns out we had a lot in common. Most notably were our love of Jesus Christ and our excitement for adoption. So I started having some brief conversations with the guy.

Soon after, that redneck invited me over to his home for a campfire, where I met another redneck friend of his. I sat on his lawn furniture, enjoyed the company, and enjoyed his family's welcoming attitude and hospitality. Then we moved across town. And they didn't offer to help. Not one wit did they offer to help. They just did. One of the redneck friends asked where the old house was, and he showed up with his big Ford F-250 and left me the keys. He didn't ask if I wanted it, and I didn't ask for it. On Friday night, they inconvenienced us again by coming by the apartment and moving all of our stuff. It was an inconvenience because on Saturday we had to email and call our Sunday School class to let them know we didn't need their help. And I had to call the truck rental place and cancel my reservation for a cube truck. One redneck has a family of people who clean up after themselves (and you) when they're the guests in your home. And the other has a wife who loves to have lots of people over, shares her vast library with Mrs. At Home, and always sends us home with more food.

And these rednecks like to cook, too. Which is good because I like to eat. But for them, cooking isn't just cooking, it's an event. One of the rednecks has invented a very large harness system for roasting a pig above ground (in the Carolinas you normally dig a pit in the ground and roast the pig at ground level - but this was more fun. And the same redneck has been known to spend an afternoon arc-welding a grill to hold a really big cast iron Dutch oven to feed 30 people a pot roast (which makes for excellent chimichangas, by the way).

And then we used a big truck, a four wheeler, some chains, and a bunch of sledgehammers and axes and sweat to completely bust up a very large deck. Then they're always helping people move, giving people rides, opening their homes, and in general just being good people.

At one of those gatherings, I was standing on the edge of the landscaping with about a 10-foot drop beneath me. It was a good place to look over the back yard, see the kids playing off in the woods, and enjoy company. I was told then, that being a redneck meant standing next to the edge of a big drop-off. I had somehow made it into redneck status, if only for a few minutes.

So this afternoon, I'm going to my first crawfish boil. I love crawfish, but have never been to a crawfish boil and never properly eaten a crawfish. And I never heard of a King Cake until this weekend.

So for the rest of my life, I'll be all those types of people that my redneck friends hate. I'm a yankee midwesterner, and I know what prepositions to end my sentences with. And I lived a large part of my life in Texas. And in spite of that, sometimes they pretend to like me (or even forgive me for those things). During the week, you can pass me the smoked sausage, mashed potatoes, and corn thankyouverymuch. But today, I get to be with my redneck people. And maybe one of these days I'll learn to back a trailer.

Family++

At work, a lot of us techie types use an IM interface more akin to IRC than other IM's. Instead of direct communication with one person, the tool has "channels" that you subscribe to, and everybody on the channel sees the message. Since we're mostly techno-geek types (more so on some channels than others), you can imagine we have our own language.

Early in the use of the tool, it was decided that we needed some way to endorse a person's contributions or to give them thanks for what they had done. There was more involved than just that the person got the immediate recognition - it had to be able to be parsed by automated programs. It was decided that "the syntax for giving recognition to a person shall be the postfix unary increment operator". The postfix unary increment operator is the highest honor any ordinary person can bestow to any other ordinary person (and thus making them 1337).

The operator has its origin in programming. A very common operation in loops is incrementing a counter. In fact, it's used so often that i = i + 1 simply takes too long to type, and hence, lazy programmers need a shorthand way to type that. Thus was born the unary increment operator. In C, and therefore legion other languages, there are actually two unary increment operators - a prefix version and a postfix version. The difference between the two is subtle, but important. In the prefix version, the increment happens prior to the evaluation of the expression, and the postfix version, the increment happens after expression evaluation.

That's certainly more information than you wanted to know. The takeaway is just that ++ adds 1 to the variable it's stuck to. It's been said (but now I can't find an article to prove it) that Bjarne Stroustrup wanted to make "a better C than C", and thus, the language C++ was born. C++ is a cute double-meaning (well, cute and double meaning to programmer geek types - if you're in the loop, it's clever, trust me). Not only is it still a brief and useful name, but it also has some implicit meaning - that it's somehow related to the C language, but somehow "one more than C"

So that's where the idea came from.

All that to say this...Mrs. At Home and K and L are very, very good people. The past couple of weeks have been very chaotic at work, and demanding more time than usual from me. I still enjoy my work. And in these times, enjoying your work is a bonus. I often remind myself during stressful days that at times like these, it's enough to be gainfully employed. But the girls have been very, very understanding of the demands of work, and that it sometimes takes me away from being helpful around here all the time. They've managed to do all the things around here that need to get done in spite of my being absent or in the way - or worse, in the house, but absent from being truly present with them.

As I was growing up, my parents gradually began to loosen the reins quite a bit. They were very strict as I was younger, and as I got older, much less so. As I got older, I had enough liberty that I had enough appreciation for the liberty that I chose to not abuse it. I basically had no curfew when I was in high school, so I chose never to stay out beyond the curfew of whatever friends I told my parents I would be with. If a friend was to be home at 10:30, and they were riding with me, I would be home at 10:35. If I had to work, and closing time was midnight, I came straight home - or at most swung through a drive-thru window on the way home. I feel the same way now. Because the girls are so understanding of my need to work more hours than normal, it bothers me to abuse that. Then the other side of the coin is that sometimes when issues can wait until the next morning, with the laptop on and already connected to work, it's too easy to sit down and bang out another response so that it doesn't have to wait until the morning.

So, thank you, girls for being understanding. You make it easy to support you. girls++. family++.

Note: as I generally call my girls "my girls", I wanted to title this post "Girls++", but opted not to because visually it would probably look too much like the name of a Motley Crue title song. That was not the aim of the post.

Emo Will....Isn't

To everybody who read it: I'm sorry. I didn't mean "I only have one friend in the whole world (kick dirt/feel sorry for myself)" I was making an observation that there are 149 people on my Facebook profile that Facebook calls my "friends" and that in reality, I'm not very close to very many of them at all. That's not saying I don't like the people on my profile - that's to say that I don't have a close relationship with very many people on my profile at all.

For history sake, here's what I said:

Thinking of giving up Facebook. It says I have 149 friends, when I really only have one, and she lives with me. No [status] update necessary.

Certainly not the most elegant of ways to convey my point, and I'm sorry I hurt anybody's feelings or made people think I've gone emo and locked myself in a dark room and set Staind on infinite loop.

But I was making a real observation. I like social networks - I like to see a bit of information on what's going on in the lives of the people I love. I also like to be able to get the aunts/uncles/grandparents the scores and stats and frequent pictures of the neices/granddaughters. I don't like to have to maintain an email list or SMS 30 people when K makes a base hit or when L traverses the monkey bars.

What's particularly interesting about this is the magic number 149.  For a time, I've felt that it's been difficult for me to really be involved in what I'm seeing on Facebook.  Some of it is interesting, but I don't know the names of peoples' children or spouses, so I'm not really that "connected" to what's going on.  I don't understand the dynamics of relationships when people comment on others' statuses, etc.  Well, when my brother saw the 149, he sent me this story on The Econmist that basically says that an anthropologist says that the theoretical maximum number of people in a network that  a human can negotiate is 148.  I never saw the number before this morning.  Certainly just coincidence, but somewhat funny, nonetheless, that an anthropologist says that you can't properly understand all the intricacies of a social network of more than 148 people, and the day I got very frustrated because I couldn't understand all the intricacies of my social network was the day I realized I had 149 "friends". (If you read the rest of the story, other people say that his theory isn't a very good one, you can handle a lot more - so they basically just told me I'm slow or have a limited capacity.)

For more background, there seems to be a continuum of the depth of relationship that people consider "friends" and how many people go into those categories. Mrs. At Home, for example, makes friendships very easily. She can go to a party with 30 complete strangers, and the next day, she'll introduce people from the party to me as her friend. (No, Mrs. At Home is not a wiseguy - when she says "a friend of mine", she doesn't mean that kind of "a friend of mine".) However, of those friends, only a very, very small numbers are close friends. I on the other hand, don't like meeting new people. I have very few friends - but all of them are close friends. I'd think it was just a difference in terminology, but it's not - there's a great deal of difference in the type of information we're both willing to share with these groups. Not bad or good - just different.

So the real observation that I made yesterday is this: there are 149 "friends" listed for me on Facebook, which is much larger than the number of "close friends" that I have. Furthermore, there are a class of people that I like very much and have many things in common with, and probably could be friends with them, but I don't communicate with them enough to really classify as "friends". There's another class of people with whom I communicate very often - often enough to have an established friendship with them, but besides a relationship at some superficial level, I don't have enough in common with them to be friends with them. (The largest pool of these would be co-workers and/or members of the opposite sex - I deliberately try to limit the amount of time or depth of conversation with people from those two pools). There is an intersection between those two groups (people I spend enough time with to call friends, and people with whom I have enough in common to call friends) - and that intersection would be the group I would call "friends". To not be a "friend" does not mean that I don't like you, nor does it mean that I would not under any circumstances be your friend. It means that you and I are at different points in our life, or have so few common interests that if we had more than a work relationship, the conversations would likely be short, or it means that even though we have much in common, we just don't talk enough for me to feel comfortable having a conversation of any real substance. Then there's the Facebook friends list. There is an intersection between the previous intersection and the Facebook one.

So I will probably begin to pare down my friend list quite a bit.  This will help me to continue to use Facebook as a tool for communication with the people with whom I've already established a deeper relationship.  Not that I don't like the other people.

So What's So Wrong With Winning

K's basketball game yesterday was a semifinal game. At halftime, K's team was down by 6. At halftime, I heard another parent say, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, "I hope they don't win. [My child] has soccer next Saturday." Yes. This parent wanted their child to be a loser so they could go on to another activity the next week. Hopefully they'll lose at that, too. And many of the other parents chimed in with similar refrains. The season is just too long to have to play one more game, even if it means your child has an opportunity to win at something.

On the drive home, there was an interview on a sports radio station. I only heard the very beginning of it before I turned it down to talk to the family. A football player was asked how they felt about the season. They were very, very disappointed because they didn't win the Superbowl. That's why you play the game - to win.

When I was in high school, I was very good at many activities. I was the principal percussionist, I was in a few math competitions, a computer science competition, and was in Lincoln-Douglas debate. But I was never the best at any of them. Sure, I was the principal percussionist in my school, I won my share of regional debate tournaments, and those I didn't win, I would win speaker points. And our math teams were always very good - regionally. But I was never really able to compete well at a state level.

Had I ditched band, math competitions, and computer science, could I have won the state title in LD debate? Well, probably not (I looked briefly at the state history, and I recognize the top two finishers in the year after my senior year - probably went to camp with them, but I don't know that I ever debated them). But with all my attention divided between all those activities, I never had a chance. In fact, my senior year I qualified for the State tournament in debate. The problem is that our calculator team qualified for state as well, and the calculator exam was at the same time as the first flight of debates. I had to choose between the events, and I picked the team (calculator) over the individual (the LD debate).

It just makes me sad that all my life, my focus was so divided over so many things that I never gave myself the chance to excel at any one of them. We bring our children up the same way. And with kids, it's a double whammy - we keep them so involved in activities that we as parents never give ourselves a chance to excel at something again. I'm not implying that activities are bad. Nor am I implying that investing time in your children is bad - heavens no - you should pour much of your time into your children. But do grownups who spend 80% of their time in the car going between activities really get to excel at anything other than being busy? Is busy-ness a badge of honor? Has "keeping up with the Joneses" been reduced to "doing as many things as the Joneses"?

There's the quote that "winning isn't the biggest thing, it's the only thing" I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. Sports and other activities are extremely valuable in teaching life skills. But the most important life skill that they all teach is that winning is a product of hard work, more hard work than the guys you're competing against. When our daughters enter the work force, they won't be chosen for their positions on where they went to school, their winning smile, their interview skills, their resume, or their grades and past achievements. They'll be chosen for all of those things in comparison to other candidates. To land a job, you're competing against the other candidates. To stay employed, you have to continue to impress your boss more than the other guys who are trying to take your place.

Sure, I want the girls to be well-rounded. But I would love for them to have the opportunity to excel in something, not because they spent the most money at it, but because they decided it's what they wanted to excel at and they invested the time and effort to make it happen.

Few Good Covers

I have pretty varied musical tastes. So I hear a lot of songs and thing "where have I heard this before?" Well, it turns out there are like a billion covers of original songs (of course, those original songs have the same four chords that have been in every song since good work tunes merged with gospel to make rock and roll). Something triggered a thought the other day. The trigger was hearing Disturbed's cover of Faith No More's Midlife Crisis. And the thought was that there are very, very few covers such that the cover is superior to the original. Of course, with me, it's hard to get a cover to be better than the original because you start with points deducted for having not written the song yourself.

So here's my list of only five cover's such that the cover is better than the original. Can you come up with others?

• Phil Collins cover of A Groovy Kind of Love. This is kinda' an honorable mention because it's one of those record label songs, so lots of artists released it. Thinking mostly in comparison to the one you hear most often by The Mindbenders)
• Faith No More's cover of Easy by The Commodores.
• Alien Ant Farm's cover of Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson.
• Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. Nine Inch Nails has done a million songs. Hurt is absolutely the best. Johnny Cash did the same song a million times better. Just about everything Johnny Cash does is exceptional. I think Hurt is the best of his stuff, but I'm probably biased because of my age.
• Faith No More's cover of I Started a Joke by Bee Gees. There's no link here to FNM's cover because it's not available for download on iTunes or Amazon. It was a single, and appeared on a few European versions of Angel Dust. I finally heard it on Who Cares a Lot?