family visit

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

adventures in cable

We got digital cable this morning. It turns out that all signal must go through the converter box, which is also the tuner, so no taping two different shows at the same time. I asked about it, and the guy said that they could send a different person out with A/B switches and stuff to fix that. I said I could just go to Radio Shack and buy the equipment if he could tell me what to do. He couldn't, unfortunately, and it looks non-intuitive. (I think some of his information was also incorrect.) So anyway, it turns out that AT&T has a standard price for fixing this problem, and it's less than the cost of the equipment (let alone my lost hair), and they can send someone over tomorrow (Dani will be home but I won't), so I'll let them have a crack at it. I gave Dani a detailed tour of the equipment today and watched him write things down. :-)

The installer said he's never seen a setup as weird as ours before. I said it was the doing of the folks at Circuit City, and I wasn't going to mess with something that worked. Entertainment-center wiring can be weird sometimes. I wonder what state it will be in tomorrow. Fortunately, everything this week is a rerun (though West Wing is one we haven't seen), so there's wiggle room.

Afterthought: the installation person told me both that all signal must go through the converter and that a system of splitters and A/B switches could solve the problem without additional converters. Obviously, one of these statements is wrong. Anyway, someone is supposed to show up today and, for a very small amount of money, make it work. We'll see what happens.