Blogiversary v2.0

Due to a set of complicated factors such as illness, Halo 2 gameplay, and sheer unimportance, we forgot to note that November 10th was the 2-year anniversary of this site.

Happy birthday to us, er something!

Punctuated equilibrium

If you think back to your high school social studies or biology classes, then you might remember two of the major theories of evolution - variational evolution, in which evolution is happening at a constant, slow pace, and punctuated equilibrium, in which things stay more or less the same for long periods of time but are occasionally punctuated with brief periods of radical change.

Why the remedial science lesson? Well, it seems like Desiree and I have just experienced the latter, and we're still reeling.

The timeline (all 2004):

May: Our old house goes on the market
Jun: Desiree accepts new job
Jul (early): Desiree starts new job with significantly different duties
Jul (late): Dan applies for new job
Sep: We accept offer on old house
Sep: We make an offer on a new house
Oct 18: Dan starts new job with significantly different duties
Oct 25: We close on the sale of our old house
Oct 25: We close on the purchase of our new house
Oct 25: We move from old house to new house

There's some other very major work stuff that happened in that timeframe that I'm not going to blog about (including the reason for the long delay between my job interview and my actual start date, as well as the completion of a major project that I've been working on for a couple of years). Fortunately, our new jobs were new roles with our existing employers, so while our day-to-day job responsibilities are now totally different than they were 6 months ago, at least neither of us has had to learn a whole new work culture.

There were also some pretty crazy problems with both real estate transactions which almost made me go prematurely grey, and for sheer amusement I may post about those sometime depending on how much of a carthartic release I need. :)

Essentially, the past six months have been constant turmoil and, unfortunately, were pretty high-stress. We've still got a lot of unpacking to do before we'll feel settled, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to start looking at my new house as a home instead of a "to do" list in time to enjoy the holidays.

Problem Quite Interesting

Ok - so I've taken some time off from blogging in order to focus on some other things; I'm in the process of getting some major things accomplished at work (which, of course, I shouldn't really discuss here) and Desiree and I are in the midst of selling our house and buying a new one. This is all very time-consuming, and in the bit o' spare time I have, I've been playing a whole lot of Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising when I don't want to think and I've been spending an unholy amount of time puzzling through the "I Love Bees" stuff when I do.

Desiree, though, has no excuse (beyond the house-selling/buying), so feel free to taunt her as needed. :)

Hopefully we're back

I'm not sure what the problem has been but many bloggers, very much including ourselves, have been in blogging hibernation.

I just haven't had the time nor desire to gather news and have an opinion about much of anything...hopefully that's about to change.

Besides, my one little Angel post has totally goofed up the layout. :)

The advantages to working at home

...or "why Desiree wishes she was home right now":

The third time's a charm

Whether you like to think of it as launch #3 or re-launch #2, stupefaction.net is back up and running.

What's different this time? A lack of editorializing and a host of new automation tools that I've written means our sister weblog about the evil (or stupid) that people do now practically writes itself.

I might as well take this opportunity to issue the (now standard) disclaimer: We are not attempting to glorify bad behavior by posting about it. Our reasons for producing such a site are the same as before.

What you say?

Yes, we're alive, and no, there really hasn't been anything on the web that's been interesting enough to post about recently. Frustrating, yes. Annoying, yes. But those are not topics for these pages. :)

We're both back at work today for the first time in a couple of weeks and we've spent the past few days being supremely lazy. Which, I must admit, has been good. The batteries are recharged and I think we're both ready to hit the ground running work-wise. Hopefully some good blog material will be forthcoming!

Holidays

Desiree and I are back from our assorted travels and are ready to enjoy some rest and relaxation here at home.

We hope everyone's enjoying their holidays!

Grumpy

I'm grumpy today. Really, really grumpy. It should be a great and relaxing day: holiday luncheon followed by an early dismissal followed by a two week vacation. But, it's not.

Last night Dan and I went to see LoTR: Return of the King. I had sorta put my foot down by saying I didn't want to deal with people on opening night this time, but after hearing my brother and his girlfriend (who went opening night) gush about it I suggested we go last night.

What a mistake.

First of all, it was sold out and while standing in line we had to listen to this moron behind us reenacting the Last Samurai with a fully detailed ending (no, we haven't seen it).
We ended up being irritated but able to deal with it and eventually we sat down to watch the movie. In the row behind us sat a group of friends...taking up the entire row. One chick out of the lot. And next to me sat a family, their about-12-year-old daughter sitting to my right.

I'll start with the 12 year old. I think she had the plague. She was so terribly sick it was all I could do to not throttle the parents as we were leaving the theater. When she wasn't sniffing (which was approximately every 3 seconds), she was sneezing or coughing. I even offered her tissues (which she didn't take). And as much as I tried to drown that out and concentrate on the movie, I couldn't.

So if that wasn't bad enough, we had the assholes behind us. Not only did they talk THE ENTIRE TIME, despite the scathing looks I threw their way, but they had to overreact about everything. Over-laughing, over-commenting, etc. And the one chick in the lot had to have EVERYTHING explained to her. What I wouldn't have gived for a hand grenade.

Needless to say, I thought the movie was good, but I could barely concentrate on it. We left the theatre with me so angry I couldn't even talk about the movie.

After we got home and went to bed, I proceeded to be woken up periodically by the kittens reenacting the battle at Minas Tirith on our legs. The last hour before I had to get up for work was spent listening to Oberon talk at length about whatever cats yodel about at 5am.

So here I am at work...already irritated and getting grumpier by the minute.

And.... I'm done

As of about an hour ago, I'm on vacation until January 5th. Another very demanding (but interesting) work year left on the junk-heap of history.

I'm not sure if being on vacation will mean more blogging or less, but there will be at least one lull as we will be gone for several days around Christmas to visit various family members.

Happy holidays!

Guarded optimism

Hope everyone who celebrates it had a good Thanksgiving.

Not to turn extrasonic into a cat blog, but a quick update is in order - Oberon saw the veterinary oncologist on Friday, who said that he tended to agree that Oberon does not have cancer. His interpretation of the results are that Oberon has a mild birth defect of the blood vessels in his bladder, and that now that it has been removed surgically, he'll simply grow out of it. We are getting a fourth opinion regarding Oberon's biopsy at a pathology lab of the oncologist's choosing. Assuming that they also agree it's not cancer, we will continue to monitor Oberon's condition with regular ultrasounds but will very likely be out of the woods.

Thanks to those who shared their encouragement; we're very attached to our pets and it has been a stressful time. Back to your regularly scheduled blogging!

Confusion

Ok. We've been thrashed around on this emotional rollercoaster long enough. I, for one, want to get off.

In addition to our 12-year-old tabby, Miller, we got two Devon Rex kittens earlier this year - Tristan and Oberon. They were around 5 months old at the time.

Shortly afterwards, Oberon came down with feline conjunctivitis (more commonly known as "pink eye"). While he was at the vet getting this treated, he urinated on the exam table. The vet thought that it looked a little dark, and tested the urine which was found to have blood in it.

The initial diagnosis was that the blood in the urine was the result of a urinary tract infection. This seemed odd given his age and the fact that he'd almost certainly have to have contracted it while he was still living with the breeders.

After several weeks of antibiotic treatment with no improvement, the vet performed an x-ray and then an ultrasound on Oberon, and the diagnosis was changed from UTI to bladder stones. There are two kinds of bladder stones in cats; both can be treated via surgery, but only one can be treated via a special diet. Since we didn't know what kind of stones Oberon had and we thought he was still too young for surgery, we put him on the prescription diet and hoped we were treating the right ailment.

Two more ultrasounds later, we were told that the stones weren't getting any smaller and were instead getting bigger. We were still concerned about Oberon's age, but at this point he was between 9 and 10 months old and we didn't have any other options, so we chose to have the surgery performed.

Oberon came out of the surgery like a champ, but we were informed by the vet afterward that while there were some very tiny stones in his bladder, there was a thickening of his bladder wall in one area, and that a biopsy was taken and sent to a veterinary pathology lab for analysis. This was alarming, but we were not seriously worried as our vet told us that it was most likely due to irritation from the stones (not to mention that Oberon is only 10 months old and therefore hasn't been alive long enough to develop anything more serious).

Well, sure enough, we received a pretty grim call from the vet on Monday. We were told the following: The pathology lab had determined that the biopsy was cancerous. Not just any cancer, mind you, but feline hemangiosarcoma - a cancer of the blood vessels that would spread quickly due to its proximity to the circulatory system. It extended "into the margins" of the biopsy sample, which meant that some of the cancer cells had not been excised from Oberon's bladder. Since it had been caught so early and a great deal of it had been surgically removed, our vet thought that there was a good chance that chemotherapy would be successful, so we immediately made an appointment with a feline oncologist. We were warned, however, that a 10-month-old kitten with cancer could only be the result of a genetic defect, and even if this instance went into full remission, Oberon would be at high risk of recurrance and for the development of other types of cancer for the rest of his life.

I asked the vet if this could be a mistake. Our vet told us that they verified that the sample was from Oberon and hadn't been mixed up with another cat, and that the pathologist who performed the analysis on the biopsy was "a Ph.D.". As Desiree noted, we were devastated.

Then we received another call from our vet yesterday. It seems that two more pathologists examined the biopsy sample and both independently determined that it was NOT cancer at all, but rather a thickening of the bladder wall as a result of trauma that could have been caused during the surgery or in a previous urinalysis (urine is extracted from the bladder via a needle in most cases and he could have gotten poked). It also could have been caused by irritation from the bladder stones, as we were originally told.

Now we have no idea what the hell to believe. We've got 1 vote for and 2 votes against cancer and no clue who to trust or why. Common sense says that there's no way in hell that a 10-month-old anything could have cancer - genetic predisposition or no, there's got to be a trigger, and it's not like he swallowed weapons-grade plutonium or something. We've requested that the biopsy be sent to a new pathology lab for additional (and theoretically unbiased) analysis, and we're planning on keeping our appointment with the feline oncologist, who will hopefully have an opinion of his own. Naturally we don't want to subject Oberon to chemotherapy if it's not required, but on the other hand we don't want to lose weeks or even days that could prove the difference in achieving some sort of remission if he does have cancer.

Honestly, I have no idea how those of you with human children can deal with even the possibility of this stuff, let alone the reality. It's been hard enough to figure out what to do with a kitten!

Sadness

We received a call from our vet last night informing us that our little Oberon has cancer. We are devastated but not willing to give up. Today I'll be talking with a specialist about chemotherapy. Please keep your hearts and thoughts with our little guy.

Oberon update

For those who are interested, Oberon came out of his surgery ok. Unfortunately, the surgery prompted more questions that we need answered, but he's coming home today and we'll focus on that happiness for now.

Positive thoughts...positive thoughts

Today our little Oberon went in for surgery. Needless to say, we're a little (read: a LOT) worried about him. So please send your positive vibes this way today as we wait to hear from the vet.

Yeubing!

Well, I just can't express how happy I was to see that Oolong's owner has gotten a new bunny named Yeubing. It took me some time to be able to really look at the new bunny and site without crying (seriously), but here it is.

Enjoy the new bunny. :)

One year

As mentioned in a previous post, Extrasonic was launched one year ago today. Since we've had so much fun with it thus far, we've stuck with the format but made several changes to the content, not the least of which is adding The Cat's Meow and Coldforged.org to our list of favorite weblogs, while some that we simply didn't find interesting anymore were removed.

Read on if you want a summary of the other changes.

Categories
The category known as "computing" has been broadened to "tech" to be more of a catch-all for computing, the Internet, consumer electronics, and other neat technology. Due to potential conflicts with work, I can't really post as much as I'd like to here. Still, it's a big part of our lives so we'll try to post what we can.

The categories "dining", "shopping", and "travel" have been consolidated down into a single "lifestyle" category. We still eat, drink, shop, and travel a lot - but we found that we typically don't blog about it.

Finally, two of our largest categories were split up - "books" was split into "books" and "comics" (complete with an icon straight out of Detective Comics #27), and "film / tv" was split into (you guessed it) "film" and "tv".

Links
The navigation on our main page (which, among other things, includes four links per category on the left navbar) has been updated to reflect the changes. The "favorite weblogs" has been updated (as mentioned above) and Bruce Sterling has been added to our list of celebrity weblogs. I've made a decision not to remove the link to Gibson's weblog, since I have a feeling it's a place he'll come back to between books. Now if only Orson Scott Card would start weblogging...

Other new link highlights include Comic Book Resources, Slush Factory, Rotten Tomatoes, and Television Without Pity.

Misc.
We're still considering ideas for some new functionality/features - the first (and only definite) to-do on our list is getting an anti-spam plugin installed. We're certainly open to suggestions, so all comments are welcome. Well, except the spam comments.

Extrasonic's birthday

Pardon our dust... over the course of the weekend, we'll be making some changes to the site in celebration of Extrasonic's 1-year anniversary on Monday, 10 November.

The "dozen categories of geeky goodness" will be tuned to better reflect what we actually post about, permalinkage to other blogs and elsewhere will be cleaned up to reflect what we're really reading a year later, and so on. If you have any thoughts on the changes, feel free to post them here.

2 week blackhole

Work's been extremely demanding on my time, which is why I haven't posted in 2 weeks. Quite honestly, I had time to post this weekend, but ended up fighting the good fight in UFO: Aftermath instead.

More content to follow.

An open letter to my wife

Desiree -

I couldn't possibly tell you what you mean to me in this format or this forum, so suffice it to say that I love you very much - so completely, in fact, that none of my most sincere ambitions and dreams include much more than you and I together forever, happy and in love.

That makes today as much (or more!) of a cause to celebrate for me as it is for you. "The boys" and I can't love you any more than we already do for this event - 'da lub' is already turned up to 11, so to speak - but we'll try lots of things to make this day special anyhow.

Happy birthday!

Love eternally,
Dan

Short break

Desiree and I spent a (mostly) computer-free holiday weekend. Very relaxing - lots of food, drink, spending time with friends and family, etc.

There was plenty of tabletop gaming, too; we took the plunge and decided to get some Mage Knight figures and try it out. Desiree's brother, Mike, and I played a decent-sized game, and despite the three of us misunderstanding some of the rules, it was still a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to playing some more. (Desiree's brother beat Mike and I, if you're wondering.) Desiree and I also managed to get in a few games of Magic.

At any rate, that should explain our short break from blogging. We'll slowly be getting back into the normal routine over the course of the week.

stupefaction.net relaunch

Well... after an abortive attempt at launching stupefaction.net in May, Desiree and I relaunched the site last night.

If you have an anthropological interest in the motivations and methods involved when people radically deviate from social, cultural, and even evolutionary/biological norms, then stupefaction.net will be for you. Or if you're just interested in unbelievably bizzare (and usually criminal) behavior, then you'll also enjoy stupefaction.net.

Check it out, if you're so inclined.

More cat pictures

We can't help ourselves.

Miller:

Tristan:

Oberon:

K-Day

Well, yesterday was officially "K-Day" here in the extrasonic household. That's right: the day where we introduced two four-month-old Devon Rex kittens into our home - which already has a 12-year-old cat.

Because we're writing this weblog the easy way, here are a couple of pictures to show the difference in size.

Miller in his bed:

Tristan (left) and Oberon (right) in the same bed:

Short blogging hiatus

Sorry for the lack of postings recently... Desiree is at a conference and I'm preparing for a business trip that will cause me to be gone until next Thursday. I'll try to make a couple of posts today, but things will be pretty thin for a while.

In the meantime, visit some of the links at the left (if you're viewing this from the main page)!

stupefaction.net

Desiree and I launched another weblog today - stupefaction.net.

It's a theme weblog - as often as we can manage (hopefully something approaching daily), we'll post links to a couple of stories about people behaving badly and ask you all to vote for which one leaves you more stupefied. Think of it as the 'evilness' equivalent of the Darwin Awards.

Anyway, I hope you'll check it out and have as much fun with it as we will.

Women and Weapons

Dan and I have started to seriously consider taking martial arts, or some sort of weapon/sword training...perhaps Asian, or even Western sword-play (not fencing).

In the process of researching, I came across this article...which made me feel a little less "odd" about wanting to wield a sword. :)

Hectic month

Suffice it to say, work has been keeping me hopping this month. I won't elaborate, but let's just say it's been a string of 80+ hour weeks with precious little time and even less motivation to browse the web and get caught up with what's going on.

I've hardly even had the energy to keep up with the news about the brave members of the US and coalition armed forces in Iraq, let alone the geek-culture stuff we usually write about. I'm not sure work is going to get much better, but I will try to ease back into some semi-regular updates to the blog.

Hmmm....

looks like I'm starting to come off as a little bitchy and bitter. :)

Return to blogging

Yes, it's been a while - Desiree and I were out of town for 3-4 days, Desiree's been sick, and I've been spending way, WAY too much time playing the Star Peace beta (soon to go to commercial launch under a new name, Legacy Online).

Well, we're back, and we've (or at least I've) got a flurry of postings for you today. Hope you find some of them interesting.

How TechTV saved us

I ran across Jumping Monkeys yesterday via random Google search, and I liked it a lot - even before I realized it was run by Megan from TechTV. That just makes me like it more. Still, it reminded me of the time that Desiree and I first saw TechTV - and how it ended up being the one positive thing we could count on during a seriously scary time.

Desiree and I took a vacation to the Grand Lido Negril in 2001. Desiree wanted to spend some time on the beach, I wanted to SCUBA, and we both needed a break.

While we were down there, we discovered TechTV on the satellite system that they had in our room (you can't be playing all the time!). We had never seen TechTV before (and neither had the Canadians, apparently, since some crazy people on a show called The Screen Savers were making a big deal at the time about bringing on their first Canadian affiliate). Being the good geek couple that we are, Desiree and I really enjoyed watching it during our downtime between activities. We lamented the fact that our cable system back in Chicago didn't carry it and we were sad to see it go.

Well, we got up on the morning of our departure, bustling around our room to pack everything up before leaving for the airport. Something possessed me to change the channel from TechTV to CNN while Desiree was in the shower, and I was stunned by what I saw. The date was September 11.

Over the next several days, we tried desperately to get home. We had no idea if people we knew were directly affected by what had happened or what was truly going on with our friends and families. We tried to make arrangements to leave, but of course no planes were being allowed into US airspace. We tried to get on a boat to Florida, but there was a huge tropical storm in the way. We tried to call the local US Embassy for more details, and we were rebuked by the Marines there who patronizingly told us "The ambassador doesn't control the airplane schedules."

Now, a lot of people have said "oh, darn, I wish I could be stranded at a resort". Let me be the first to tell you that it's not all that you might hope. First, we had to continue to pay for our time there. That's not at all good when you've carefully budgetted how much you can spend on your vacation and then have to pay for an extra 5 days (especially at an all-inclusive resort like the Grand Lido). Secondly, we were in our rooms all day, every day trying to get through on the phone to the US (the international telco circuits were buried under the load), contacting local airlines to find some way off the island, etc. We weren't having any sun or fun those days, believe me. Finally, there was the worry - what had happened to our friends in New York? What was really going on at home? CNN could only convey so much - it was hard to be away from home at that time.

Which brings me to my point - at the end of each day, when we were resigned to the fact that we just weren't getting the hell off the island (but wanted to stay in our rooms in case we got a miracle call saying that there was a flight and we could leave), we would lay on our bed and watch TechTV. It was reassuring in a wierd, geeky kind of way, and it REALLY helped us keep from bouncing off the walls with sheer anxiety. The Screen Savers really did save us - just not in a technical way.

In the end, all of the Candian jokes from Leo, et al. over the previous week made us think of an alternative plan - we couldn't fly to the US, but we could get to Canada. An Air Canada flight was departing to Toronto, and we had a chance to get on it. The only available seats were full-fare first class, but at this point we were willing to go into whatever debt necessary to get home. Slight problem though - the flight was from Kingston, on the southeast side of the island. We were in Negril, on the northwest side. We had to cross the whole country to get to our flight, and we had to do it fast.

So I did what anyone would do - I chartered a private plane to fly us there (yay - more debt!). It was a little cozy, since the plane had only four seats (the pilot, the co-pilot, Desiree, and I filled them all). We took off from a semi-dirt runway and off we went. I still have the claw-marks in my arm from where Desiree was squeezing the entire flight, but we eventually made it to the airport, got on our Air Canada flight, and got back to Toronto. Not wanting any problems trying to cross the border to get into the US in a rental car, Desiree's sister graciously offered to drive from Chicago to Toronto to pick us up and bring us back, which we thankfully took her up on.

Now, over a year later, we're safe and sound - married, living in a new (to us) house - one that's serviced by a cable company that carries TechTV. Our thanks to Megan and the rest of the Screen Savers crew for providing some level of distraction during that difficult time. And hey - read Megan's weblog! It's pretty cool.

Bye Oolong

Oolong passed away on Tuesday, much to my sadness. I am happy in thinking his owner loved him very much and he had a good life.

[From Dan]
We'll miss you, Oolong.

Work != life

Don't get me wrong - I am a recovering work-a-holic, and I still average about 50 or so hours a week. I won't hesitate to step up to an 80+ hour work week when called upon to do so, even when that call leads me to the other side of the earth for weeks at a time. However, the events of 2002 in my personal life have put a bit of a perspective on things for me.

This Fast Company article (linked everywhere, but seen first at Mike's) challenges you to address the question "To what can I devote my life?" Does it bother anyone else that the implication is that this devotion has to be through work?

Sure, I could think of jobs I'd rather be doing (that'd likely be significantly different from what I do now), but those are impractical for a variety of different reasons. Is this perceived impracticality a shortcoming on my part - am I somehow failing to screw up the courage to do what I "should" be doing professionally?

I don't think so. I like what I do well enough. I get to help people solve problems, which is a characteristic of my "ideal" jobs anyhow. I also think I'm pretty good at what I do. Most importantly, my job, in many ways, gives me the opportunity to enjoy my life outside of work in ways that the "impractical yet more personally fulfilling" jobs couldn't. When it comes right down to it, that's what I've devoted my life to - contributing to the happiness of my wife, my family, and my friends and enjoying the time that I have with them. The job is only a means to that end.

Long time, no post

Well, after a 2-week hiatus from both work and blogging, Desiree and I are back. The front page may look a little sparse for a while, but I don't think it will take long for us to get back into posting shape.

We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

Oh, the places you'll go...

Sorry for the lack of entries; it's been hectic so far this week at work and only going to get worse. I'm off to the airport in a few hours, so expect the rest of the week to be sparse in terms of posting (unless Desiree decides to get prolific).

Doing my usual end-of-year reflection, one of the things that I realized is that I've travelled a lot in the past 18 months or so. Just some of the places I've been in that time:

Austin, TX
Bethesda, MD*
Boulder, CO*
Ehningen, Germany
Herrenberg, Germany
Key West, FL
Miami, FL
Nassau, The Bahamas
Raleigh, NC*
Shanghai, China*
Sindelfingen, Germany
Singapore, Singapore
Somers, NY*
Stuttgart, Germany
Tokyo, Japan
Toronto, Canada*
Washington, D.C.*
White Plains, NY*

*multiple trips

That list doesn't include (among other things) the travel to see friends and family, so it's fair to say that I've been in transit quite a bit. Most of it has been work-related (although I think you can pick out the honeymoon location pretty easily from the list above), so there has been very little sightseeing or leisure time. For example, despite being in Singapore for a couple of weeks, the only pictures on my camera when I got home were of the sculpture that memorializes the lives lost during the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II. While that's very photo-worthy (link is not to one of my own pictures), I only manged some shots of it because it was visible from my hotel window. :(

More when I return from this week's jaunt...

Whither extrasonic?

So where are we going with this whole extrasonic thing? So far we sort of resist classification into one of the common weblog 'genres'.

We're not an online journal/diary, at least in part because I am what I'd consider to be intensely private. Desiree, on the other hand, would tell the most intimate details of her life story (which necessarily invades my privacy) to a complete stranger - but I find a way to love her anyway. :)

We're not a political blog, although that's not for lack of an opinion. To scour news sites and constantly put our political spin on rehashed news that people already know about seems tiresome and wildly time-consuming. That's not to say that you'll never see political commentary here; it's just unlikely that it will be regular or even common.

We're not a news/editorial blog, because after all, we do have jobs and can't constantly scour the Internet for breaking stories that interest us. Besides, there are lots of sites, depending on the type of news you're interested in, that already do a damn fine job of aggregating interesting bits.

We're not a design or photoblog, despite the fact that we enjoy those blogs a lot.

Up to now, we've probably proven to be more like the blogs that offer a collection of links with light commentary, like DiaWebLog, Memepool, and Robot Wisdom, although we're not nearly as prolific as those and we do have infrequent fits of original content.

I guess so far extrasonic has been about our life on the web; it's certainly not our whole lives, but it is about the things we see on the web and do with our computers recreationally - our digital shadow, in a sense. You've been getting the rough size and shape, but missing a lot of detail. But is that what we're really going for? Over the next couple of weeks, Desiree and I will be toying with new ideas, although we're not quite sure what those will be yet. After all, what's the point in blogging if you can't experiment and evolve?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Desiree and I to everyone who celebrates it. Enjoy the holiday weekend (here in the US)!

To move or not to move...

So Dan, should we move to Seattle? Then we won't have to feel bad about leaving the Bat Cave. :)

Site redesign

Less than 2 weeks old and we're already giving extrasonic the once-over.

The new look-and-feel has been validated in the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera for Windows; known problems exist with Netscape 4.x, but no more than any other CSS-based site. There are some issues with the side navigation columns not showing up properly in older version of IE for MacOS - we're working on those.

Also, please bear with us as we work out the kinks with the comment and archive pages.

If you have compatibility problems, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us: dan [at] extrasonic [dot] com or desiree [at] extrasonic [dot] com.

Sweet Home Chicago

I had to go into the city yesterday for a business meeting - before my friends who work in the city get offended, my meeting started at 8:30am, I worked through lunch, and was back on a train before 5pm - and it revitalized me a bit.

It's difficult for me to articulate exactly what it is I love about Chicago. I do know that walking through the city, surrounded by people and life, was a great feeling. Despite the rain and the cold, people were bustling purposefully from place to place. Even after all these years, I'm still mildly awestruck by the teeming mass of humanity that downtown Chicago plays host to; it's at once enormous, anonymous, and yet still somehow intoxicatingly inclusive. Definitely a great feeling.

Welcome!

Today - November 10th, 2002 - is extrasonic's official launch date; Desiree and I invite you to check back often.

Desiree and I, both born in the '70s, were married in May of 2002 and live in the suburbs of Chicago. We both work with computers in general and the Internet in specific - Dan for one of the largest companies in the world, and Desiree for a local school district. We're self-proclaimed geeks, a sensibility that will likely serve as a foundation for much of what you'll see here.

Our primary goal is to use this weblog as a way to share the things that we're thinking and talking about with our friends and family. If a few random passers-by also find it interesting, we won't mind.

Questions about the site? Contact us!

Dan @ extrasonic (dot) com
Desiree @ extrasonic (dot) com