Zeigen

The other day I embedded a YouTube video in one of my blog posts, using the HTML code that YouTube provides on their site.

Trouble is, YouTube’s code uses the “embed” tag, which is not HTML 4 standards-compliant. There’s no such tag as “embed” (even though Firefox and IE know how to display it — but that’s a rant for another day).

I experimented a bit with trying to make it just an object instead, but wasn’t able to get the right parameters so that it would be embedded properly and use the flash player that YouTube provides.

Just now I ran across a post by Bernie Zimmerman that explains the trick. So now Zeigen’s Blog is once again valid HTML code and standards-compliant.

In case Bernie’s web site ever goes down, the trick is to use this HTML code instead of the junky invalid HTML code that YouTube provides:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:350px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/foo"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/foo" /></object>

(where “foo” is replaced with the video’s unique code assigned by YouTube, found at the end of the URL for the video)

Why does this matter? Increasingly we use different types of browsers to read the World Wide Web — Treos, toasters, braille-readers, Opera, you name it. The W3C standards are the rules for how the Web works; if you play by the rules, then you can predict that most people should be able to read your page. YouTube doesn’t play by the rules. The end results of not playing by the rules are ultimately anarchy and chaos, my friend, anarchy and chaos.

I co-wrote a book on this sort of thing — woah, that’s coming up on 10 years ago.

My friend John R. invited Sam P., Patti S. and me over last night to watch the California Golden Bears compete against Texas A&M in the Holiday Bowl. We had Chinese food (thanks John!) and Kimi made us a couple of small cakes (chocolate and pumpkin spice) for dessert.

I couldn’t believe how big Isaac and Adam (John and Darin’s two sons) are getting. Isaac made us a spaceship out of a new toy Adam got for Christmas (I don’t know the name of the toy, but it was sort of like tinkertoys except much larger scale and made out of foam), and we blasted off to the moon since we didn’t have time to go to Pluto.

(Stop right here if you recorded the game and haven’t watched it yet.)
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My brother-in-law John’s dad (his real name is Howard but he always goes by “Foot”) treated John and me to a movie on Saturday night — The Good Shepherd. I was a little disappointed, because of how much praise I’d heard lavished on this movie ahead of time. While the acting was great, it was hard to treat it as a historical film given that the main character (played by Matt Damon) was a fictionalized composite, and it was hard to treat it as a spy drama when there was so little action or insight into the spying business or how the CIA was actually created. For all of its three hour running time, it feels like not much happens. I didn’t get bored, and I appreciated a lot of what was shown as a character drama, but ultimately I expected and wanted more. Be warned that the pace is quite slow, and Matt’s character is very remote and unemotional most of the time, which makes it difficult to relate to him.

Joe Pesci appears out of nowhere for one scene; Robert De Niro is only in a couple. But it is a very impressive cast overall.

One problem for me is that Matt Damon simply looks 25 to me. (I know he’s actually 36.) When called upon to be 55, his face just cannot do the job.

I was amused that another movie with a similar title, The Good German, was released the same week. (I haven’t seen it.) I thought of mixing the two, but someone already beat me to it. Hah.

On Tuesday, I was talking about my trip to Tacoma with my dad and my brother Rob while we were driving to pick up lunch. Dad asked where Tacoma was. I said it was about an hour south of Seattle, which is a bit of an exaggeration, since it’s really only about 40 minutes. Rob (who went to school in Washington) said Tacoma was only ten minutes away from Seattle. We ended up betting $20, that there is no point in Seattle that is only ten minutes or less away from any point that’s in Tacoma.

I’ve checked a few maps, and definitely can’t find any such points. The best I can find is that Tacoma is 32 miles from Seattle, which is more than ten minutes.

So, unless he gets help, Rob owes me $20.

For the first time in years, I didn’t spend Christmas day with my parents; instead, we were in Tacoma and spent the day at Foot and Louise’s house in Lakewood, south of Tacoma. (Foot and Louise are my sister-in-law Tomi’s husband John’s parents.) They also hosted us for dinner the night before, which in their tradition is a variation of Wigilia — we had breaded whitefish, cucumber salad, rice, mashed potatoes, bread, and lobster thermidor (the idea being all white or near-white foods). It was a wonderful evening and Christmas day, and Foot and Louise as well as Tomi and John lavished us with gifts (so much so that even with half-packed suitcases we had difficulty packing).

Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas (or “Boxing Day” as we used to call it in England), we got up at 6:45am, and thanks to Louise kindly giving us a ride, we headed to Seatac and our flight to Sacramento. There were no problems with Seatac but our flight was delayed half an hour, and it took forever at Hertz to get our minivan, so we were late getting to my parents’ place. Everyone was there — my sister Joanna and all three of my brothers (Phil, Rob and Harry), plus Phil’s wife Erin and daughter Sarah, and Rob’s wife Kelly.

Sammy was pretty good on the plane but needed his nap, but with all the people and excitement he couldn’t stay asleep. So he got to open a ton of presents — so many great presents. I took a picture of him surrounded by them yesterday, I’ll put that up at some point. I just want to say thank you to all his aunts and uncles who were so generous.

We had arranged a gift exchange between my brethren and sistren. I had bought Kelly a big world atlas, and Kimi got Rob some games and the DVD set for “Jack of All Trades” (Bruced Campbell’s short-lived historical TV series). Erin got me the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection plus a Serenity/Firefly game (awesome!), and Phil got Kimi and wonderful collection of scrapbooking and craft items.

Harry had to leave early for his flight to Canada (which made Sarah very sad because she loves playing with her Uncle Harry so much), so I didn’t get to see him (or Kelly, who drive him) very much. Joanna had to leave that evening because she was working the next day. But it was great to reconnect with my family. Phil, Rob, dad and I played a bunch of Ricochet Robots (which Rob had given to Phil along with some other games.

Mom was scheduled for a sleep-deprivation EKG test early on Wednesday morning, and was only allowed to sleep from 10pm to 2am. So Rob and Phil got her up and Rob stayed up all night talking with her to keep her awake, then Rob came with me as I drove mom to her appointment. It was an interesting process; hopefully the doctors can use the EKG to better fine-tune her medications and help prevent her from falling anymore.

Rob and I napped at home afterwards, and after a brief lunch, we drove Rob home and finally returned home ourselves. Unpacking all the luggage was exhausting, but now we’re done and it feels great to be back. Our two cats left a few “presents” for us, so the spirit of Christmas was living on.

So a couple of weeks ago I watched the “Saturday Night Live” episode hosted by Justin Timberlake, and they had this parody video on, called “A Special Christmas Box,” which I found quite funny. Later I was reading a TiVo Community forum thread about it, and followed a link therein to the uncensored YouTube version uploaded by NBC (which, on a tangent, I think is a good move on NBC’s part, since it helps increase the popularity of SNL).

Here comes the “oops” part. At the same time, I was sending an e-mail to a couple of internal mailing lists about a problem some customers were encountering. Instead of sending the proper URL to the forum thread, I inadvertently pasted in the YouTube URL to the video below.

First sign of a problem was when someone wrote me back and said:

Stephen, what thread were you trying to post? The link just goes to some weird music video.

Now I’m expecting HR to knock on my door. If I get fired this week, now you know why.

On the other hand, another guy wrote me this:

Stephen - Funniest video I’ve seen in years….thanks!!!!

If you celebrate that kind of thing!

I like the word “Tacoma.” Strong word, very mellifluent (sort of like how L.M. Boyd claimed that people who don’t speak English choose “nausea” and “diarrhea” as the two most attractive-sounding words).

In pounding rain and after only just barely getting everything packed and wrapped and delivered and back home in time for the shuttle, I flew out Thursday night, and Kimi picked me up at Seatac. Kimi’s been staying with her sister Tomi and Tomi’s family: Her husband John and three-year-old daughter Kira.

Yesterday we spent the morning visiting Santa Claus at the Tacoma Mall. Only after waiting two hours in line (in shifts) did we see all these people cutting in front of us. What’s going on? we asked. Oh, if you become a member of this mall kids club thing, you can cut to the front of the line. How much does it cost to join? $5 a year. Yikes. For $5 we’d have gladly saved two hours of time.

Sammy was, naturally, terrified of Santa, who seemed like a decent chap. They took three pics: One of Sammy bawling his eyes out, then Kimi jumped in and distracted him for a brief second, and he’s looking at the camera with a strange expression that if you didn’t know what was happening you might think was nearly a smile, and then another one of him bawling. Kira’s expression is a bit flat. But at least Santa and Kimi are smiling radiantly. (I’ll scan in the photo when we get home and put it up; I know there haven’t been many photos here lately.)

Tomi had a small party for friends and neighbors last night, and we had lots of cake and cheese and cookies, and played Apples to Apples, which remains one of my very favorite party games for mixed groups. Kimi made snicker dooodles and chocolate crinkles, which didn’t do much for my diet because I can’t resist them.

Today we had brunch with Kimi’s dad, one of the most dour men I have ever met, but Sammy can charm anyone, so things went well.

I took Sammy for a brief walk. Brrrr. His vocabulary is coming along, and he’s very interested in airplanes. In addition to being able to say “uh-oh” and “bye bye” and “mama” and “dada” and recognizing (sort of, some of the time) what we want him to do when we ask him to point to his ears or his nose, I do believe that on that walk he told me he was freezing his buns off. Only he pronounced it, “Mfwwa bah fala bah?”

We’ll be up here in Tacoma until Tuesday morning, and then we fly in to Elk Grove for my mom’s birthday.

/fnhtugufd fcs cdgxfn,ccccccccc

Wednesday night after finishing up my budget and trying to clear my inbox, I headed over to Kyrie’s place and drove her and the twins down to Los Gatos for the Fantasy of Lights. I told Kyrie I’d be there by 7pm, but didn’t arrive until 7:15pm. The drive took about 20 minutes, and on the way down, the boys were cautiously excited. But then Andy (who was a bit sick) fell asleep while we were waiting in line to get in, all of three minutes before entering. He was dead asleep and no amount of prodding could rouse him. So he missed out, due to me being late. Sorry, Andy.

Fortunately, Jack loved it, especially the animated cannonballs and the new section in the middle featuring Christmas dinosaurs. Kyrie thought the dinosaurs were off-theme, but hey, the dinosaurs celebrated Christmas too, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Oh, they didn’t? Well, they looked cool anyway. All Elves and Santa gets a bit boring, you definitely need a T-Rex to liven things up.

Why didn’t anyone tell me the search feature on the blog was generating a barf error? I fixed it now. Search to your heart’s content.

Even now, weeks after the events, I still find myself thinking about James Kim and his family and what happened to them in the remote Oregon wilderness. I catch myself wondering how I’d be able to handle myself if I ever found myself in the same situation — and if I, like James, would be able to save my family. Imagine being trapped with your family in the middle of nowhere for a full week, running out of food, almost out of gas, not knowing if help will ever arrive. It’s horrifying to me. Right or wrong, I too probably would have left in search of help.

TiVo Inc. is contributing to the James Kim family donation fund, and if you, like me, were hit by this story on a personal level, I just wanted to encourage folks to be aware of the CNET donation page.

CNET’s latest episode of “CNET’s Tips for Digital Living” includes a tribute to James (starting around the 13 minute mark). You can download it for your Series2 DVR connected to broadband using TiVoCast, or watch it in a browser at CNET’s site. I personally could not watch it without getting choked up. James was a very talented guy, and his reviews were fun to watch.

(I spelled that title correctly without having to look it up, go me. Schadenfreude is of course the German word for taking pleasure at someone else’s suffering.)

Quick, if you have a Series2 connected to broadband, download this episode of Union, fast forward to the 13 minute mark, and watch all the people crash their bikes. Grimace. Shudder. Feel revulsion. Then rewind and do it again.

What’s wrong with me that I love watching the pain, agony and humiliation of these bike riders in their most ignomious moments?

Yesterday early I dropped off Kimi and Sammy at the airport to fly up to Tacoma to stay with Kimi’s sister Tomi’s family through Christmas. I’ll join them on Friday, December 22. That means that in the meantime, I’m a bachelor.

Last night my friend Moses (a great photographer, who was here to photograph the TiVo kids party with Santa) and I went to dinner at Amarin Thai, which he thought was just ok. I normally love it, but I think we didn’t really pick the best dishes.

After that, I caught up on TV and was freaked out by how quiet the house was. Even the two cats were quiet.

Tonight, I’m heading over to John and Yvonne’s to play board games. O the carefree life of the bachelor!

Hey, rather than spam my friends and family, if you’re looking for a gift idea and want to give the gift of TiVo, contact me and I’ll let you know the details for the friends and family offer. Since this is a public blog I’m not going to publicize the details, and as far as contacting me goes, I figure you know already if you’re one of my friends or family. So drop me a line if you qualify and are interested.

Gotta go, Santa’s in the open area at TiVo HQ, and my friend Moses is taking pictures.

In related news, we had the TiVo holiday party last night at the Hyatt, and the HR/Shipping folks did a great job setting it up. Definitely the best TiVo holiday party in years.

Woah, where did the week go? Today marks the second week of my being on the diet.

There are times of day where all I can think about is food. There are so many temptations in the office, especially during the holiday season… Donuts, birthday cakes, snacks, baby shower cakes, bagels. At a recent meeting we had some partners come in to talk about the user design for a project we’re working on. Someone put a tray full of danishes and other pastries out — right in front of me. I was staring at this perfect cherry danish during the whole meeting.

In general I’ve been very good, resisting temptation. Sugar drinks and desserts and between-meal snacks are definitely at a minimum. I’ve not been so good on the gym/Team Fitness side — I get an F there. That’s probably why I’m not making much progress this week. There was one moment when the scale said 169.5. Then it jumped to 173. I was shocked. I relevelled the scale and it showed 170.5. So that’s seven pounds in two weeks, but no change from last Sunday. Of course, the 3 pounds lost last weekend when I was ill was probably just dehydration, so I think it’s fair to say I lost four pounds last week and three pounds this week.

On Thursday, our friend Zoë (Kyrie’s sister) gave birth to a baby boy. Congrats, Zoë and George, and welcome to the world, Thomas!

To help out, on Friday, Kimi watched Zoë’s 3-year-old, Nick, with Kyrie’s twins, Jack and Andy. (She took them to the Aviation Musuem, which they love.) Trouble was, Nick was sick with some nasty bug, and Kimi had to deal with his explosive diarrhea. (This is the kind of detail that I’m sure you wanted to read. But far be it from me to hold back from relating the essential details.) Two days later, Kimi was too sick to get out of bed, and I ended up taking her to the emergency room again on Sunday afternoon. After being seen by the same doctor, who had little sympathy for the fact she had been throwing up non-stop since 3am, she took the anti-nausea medicine and then ended up rallying a bit that evening, and she seemed okay Monday morning.

I went to work, but started feeling ill myself, and came home at 2:30. Kimi really fell apart then and slept from 3pm to 7:30am Tuesday morning. It was rough taking care of Sammy that afternoon, as my head and stomach were both churning. Sammy also had some nasty stuff going on, and was cranky as a result. (Diaper rash was just one of his woes.) I have never changed so many diapers in a 24 hour period.

I stayed home today, and now, finally, all three of us are starting to feel better. Thanks to Yvonne for stopping by this evening to help out.

The only good news is for my diet. I had been pretty good over the last week, resisting donuts at work, drinking only water or diet drinks, eating smaller portions in general, and turning down desserts (with one exception, a slice of cake for Laura’s baby shower at work, oh, and a slice of Kimi’s sweet potato cheesecake). I get an F for the workout side, though — never made it to the gym or Team Fitness. Monday morning, I weighed 173.5, down 4 pounds from last week, which I felt was pretty good progress for a week. After yesterday, where I was (so to speak) burning from both ends, I found out this morning that I weighed 170.5. I didn’t really eat much today (didn’t feel like I could keep anything substantial down, so it was just chicken soup and some 7-Up), so I bet I’ll weigh even less tomorrow.

So in last few weeks, my mom (who is paralyzed on her left side after an aneurysm in 1995), has fallen out of her wheelchair three times, and after the third time was hospitalized after cracking a few ribs.

Among other things, we’re looking into one of those Life Alert services — something that can help if she’s, well, fallen and can’t get up.

We’ve seen Life Alert, but I also see some questionable business practices in reviews (and $60/month plus a $300 setup fee seems outrageous). Anyone had any experience with this type of device and service?

We’d go with a cellphone but they’re not as easy for her to carry with her all the time, and she’d need to keep it charged.