I’ve had some amazing moments of social serendipity lately. Call it the “small world” phenomenon or six degrees of separation minus most of the degrees, but frankly it is a bit odd. And, even though I’ve recently joined LinkedIn to explore my network of professional contacts once-, twice-, and thrice-removed, technology hasn’t contributed at all to what’s been going on.

Last week at the Special Olympics basketball tourney I wrote about I met a mom of one of the participants, a woman named Alison Leland. She was reading the New York Times in the bleachers so, this being middle-class Texas, I immediately knew she wasn’t like most of the other families there. Turns out, Ms. Leland is the wife of the late Texas congressman Mickey Leland. I only knew a bit about Mickey Leland: the causes he championed, the foes he made, the way he died. Forward a few days to New York City where I was meeting with some of the staff of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and where, just for conversation’s sake, I mentioned this small world encounter with Ms. Leland. The team looked at me and said, “You know, the idea for this museum was Mickey Leland’s.” Hmm, small world.

This week I also learned about a computer scientist doing some interesting work in Arabic machine translation who one of my colleagues holds in very high regard. Her name is Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, a distinctive name to be sure and one that rang a bell. Now, I’m not certain of the connection, but it seems that she must be related (daughter?) to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the father of population genetics, author of the seminal History and Geography of Human Genes, and mentor of IBM’s globetrotting co-principal on the Genographic Project Spencer Wells — a project of which I am a part. Genetic forensics, indeed!

Then last night. A friend of ours lent my wife a book she loved to help us in our struggle to find a name for our third child, due in May. It was called The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. This of course is also the name of the much-lauded online app (also known as NameVoyager) from last year that dynamically maps the popularity of names over time and which was created by Martin Wattenberg, Laura’s husband, and an IBM colleague of mine. I had no idea there was a book to accompany the site.

What does this prove? If the connections between the pairs of people and myself in each of these examples was a little less random it might suggest a widening professional circle. But two of the three pairs intersect my personal life too.

Oh, how I’d love this web visualized. Martin, are you listening?

I saw an all-star basketball game in Houston this weekend. Nah, not the NBA one. I got to see my brother-in-law participate in a Special Olympics qualifying tournament. For a while it was hard not to get choked up whenever a game started, quite honestly. (They played 8 minute games.) These kids — some were adults, but all were children in a way — came ready to play and were as into the contest as any athlete I’ve ever seen. The joy on their faces was genuine and unbridled.

My brother-in-law, a physically-talented 16-year-old with Down’s Syndrome, stole the show. Last week he had the dubious distinction of receiving a technical foul for swearing on the court (for a not discreet “Goddamnit!”), but this week his notoriety was all the good kind. In game two his team won 8-6 on his two three-point buckets (one of which was all net) and a layup — and they play on full size courts with regulation baskets! He would run back after his shots and taunt the crowd into louder praise. It was high comedy. But there were other heros too, some of whom never even touched the ball. Autistic kids who would crack a rare smile when their team (or the other team) scored; Downs kids so severely afflicted that a high five was an effort, but one gladly made; kids with all manner of protective eyewear and headgear who would’ve suffered through the whole event in chainmail if that’s what it took to participate.

You might think that such an event would be hard on an expecting parent. The gymnasium was a collection of reminders of the ways in which the miracle of conception can go awry. But actually I felt the opposite. That gymnasium was also a collection of reminders of the way that true happiness has a way of trumping the saddest twists of fate.

How often do you get to see sport in its purest form? Competition without caustic rivalry, accomplishment without showboating? As in most aspects of life for those with mental disabilities, the tournament showed absolutely no recognition of differences in race, gender, or ability. Everyone was legitimately there to have fun. The difference between this tournament and the rowdy, gaudy crowds that poured into Houston for the NBA All-Star game all weekend could not have been starker.

Wow, I didn’t exactly bounce back from the Turkey trip like I thought I would. Here’s what I have been meaning to post. Unrelated, all of it.

The news that they’ve found a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings is, well, big news. This is the first such new discovery since Carter found Tut in 1922, though no one seems to mention that Kent Weeks’ re-discovery of KV5 in 1995 is actually just as profound — possibly more so. I’m skeptical that the new tomb, called KV63, will create as many questions as KV5 did and does. From the scanty information it seems like KV63 was a cache or waypoint or merely a lesser noble’s attempt to flank the pharoahs’ tombs. Time will tell, but one thing is certain: count the references in the media to Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, versus the number of references to Edwin Brock and Otto Schaden, leaders of the team who actually found the tomb, and you will get a sense of how things go now for archaeologists in the Egypt.

When was the last time the word “museum” was used to sex something up? Never comes to mind. Well, not at the former Chicago Historical Society which has been newly rebranded the Chicago History Museum. While former director Lonnie Bunch takes the helm of the newly-placed National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in DC, the CHS has dropped the S to seem more inclusive, less upper-crust. Maybe “museum” is better. Though the etymology of the word as a cage for muses suggests old-fashion animals-behind-bars zoos, “museum” at least has an egalitarian sense that “society” does not. Better than the Exelon Chicago History Adventure, I suppose.

On the flight back from Turkey I sat next to a retired DEA agent who had made Istanbul a part-time home. In the 1990’s he was stationed there with the task of evaluating the anti-narcotics programs of the former Soviet ‘stans. He had tons of fascinating stories and, though we did no drugs, his penchant for drinking scotch hand over fist didn’t do me any favors. See not bouncing back from the jetlag, above.

Songbird, the open source, Mozilla-based media player is out in pre-alpha proof-of-concept form. It does little more than play music now, but the interface is awash in non-functional functions that really make you think this could be an iTunes killer if it is sustained and, most importantly, if the development community seizes the add-on opportunities as they have with Firefox and Thunderbird. I am keeping my eye on this one.

Working together as team with no “I” in sight these four blurbs make up a single post. Let us applaud their selflessness.

• I received an e-mail today congratulating Ascent Stage on being a rare Googlewhack, a search result wherein two terms exist only on that page. My whackedness? Jabberwockys and biosphere. Not jabberwocky singular, mind you; that returns lots of results. But the plural plus biopshere is all mine, baby.
• Coming home from Sunday dinner at my sister’s last night I spotted a Macintosh G4 sitting, crying really, in the middle of our alley. As my wife recounted to me later — I blacked out a bit in excitement — I swerved into our garage nailing a few lawn chairs and boxes, jumped out of the car without shutting the engine off, and neglected the children in their seats to save the lonely tower. It has no video output and something in it shakes around, but everything is where it should be: HD, memory, chip, etc. It is almost certainly hot as it has Property Control bar code on it, but if I found it in the alley it’s mine right? I mean, this is the law of the street. The alleydwellers who pilfer our trash are part of our ecosystem. We don’t call them thieves. How do I get this thing repaired without getting thrown in jail?
• As I have a Marco Polo-esque (perhaps Alexander-esque?) series of travels coming up I have ripped a bunch of DVD’s to my laptop hard drive. Really this was a series of tests on the Mac and PC to see what’s the best way to do it en masse. The short answer is that it is a !@*&load harder to do than MP3’s. Sony, for instance, renowned for being reasonable in their anti-copying efforts, load their DVD’s up with blank dummy cells that throw most rippers for a loop. This is surmountable, but only after hours of corrupt ripping and a healthy dose of cussing.
• I’ve begun blogging internally inside IBM. Like I need another timesuck, but hey I gotta tell some people the stuff I can’t tell the loyal readers of Ascent Stage (yet)!

Recently I have encountered a few people violently opposed to new year resolutions. They say, what’s so special about January 1? If you want to change yourself just do. Or they say, resolutions set you up for failure. Change should be gradual and flexible.

OK, fine. But I like to make lists, especially those that I can cross stuff off of. So maybe what I really like is unmaking lists. Here’s the list to be undone for 2006.

1. Cook. I like to cook, but I have been cursed with a wife who is both more willing and more skilled at doing so. If only she’d let me do it more often. A few of the blogs I read are by cooks, amateur and professional, so I have resources and inspiration. Pass the olive oil!
2. Visit San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, or Santa Fe, all US cities I have never been to.
3. Rip DVD collection. A much more daunting task in practice (if not in volume) than the CD collection. Decryption, dumping of extraneous video material, figuring out the best format for playback, getting the video from the server to the TV, and of course the immense storage requirements. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but the final push was purely practical: our kids have already destroyed one DVD player and one CD player and we’re constantly washing their drool, half-chewed meals, and finger muck off of the actual discs. Ain’t nothing to touch on a video server.
4. Get to know the south side of Chicago. Lots of hidden architectural gems and great parks, not to mention restaurants and clubs, down there. If it was good enough for the 1893 Expo it is good enough for me.
5. Look into Italian dual-citizenship. My father and my siblings are all eligible. Still debating the merits of this, but I am sure it will smooth the path to my dream of owning a villa in southern Italy. Of course, it also opens up political possibilities.
6. Shave head. Or at least near-shaved. The cruel irony of male hair loss is that the more you lose the more often you have to get your haircut so as not to look like you are growing for the combover. There’s certainly maintenance involved in a shaved head, but at least there’s no mistaking my intentions.
7. Visit Xian, China. Should be easy given my travel to China. Gotta have some “safety” resolutions.
8. Find Jim LoBianco. My roommate from study in Rome in 1993. In the seminary at the time, most likely ordained now. Why can’t the interweb help me find him? May need to appeal to higher powers in the search.
9. Run a half-marathon. Once upon a time I regularly ran 25 miles a week. And then the midget squad arrived and my mileage plummeted. Time to ignore the kids.
10. Teach sons how to swim. One is terrified of the water, the other thinks he can swim, which is far more dangerous.
11. Call (not ping, not e-mail) my mother more often. Because “hi, mom, love u … brb” just doesn’t cut it.
12. Return to home winemaking. Made a batch of mostly-swill Mouvedre in 1996. It didn’t kill me, so I must be stronger. A decade later I’m ready to try again.

12 resolutions, 12 months. Begin.

Today is the first day since shortly after my first son’s birth in 2001 that we’ve not had a nanny. Things change. The dynamics of our home life are radically different than they were back then when my wife and I both worked full time separated by a commute and had only a newborn to contend with. Now things are at the same time more complex, a curious four-year-old and a precocious two-year-old with an infant coming in May, and simpler, my wife works from home with flexible hours and school is ramping up to five days a week for the older boy.

We hoped to keep our beloved nanny on as part-time help and to this she agreed initially. But the fact is — and this is the bitter reality at the heart of the matter — however much you and your children may love the hired help, the parent-nanny relationship is, at root, an economic one. You pay for services rendered, even if a portion of that service is love. And if the economics of the relationship don’t make sense, then the bond is broken. There’s something slightly whorish when you look at it that way, but there it is.

In a review of Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century Directions to Servants in the most recent Atlantic Monthly Mona Simpson notes:

For generations women have been puzzling over the ethics and etiquette of “having” help. The very verb is troubling—what boys of my generation said about the girls they’d laid—because “help” has traditionally helped us with what is still, no matter the opinion of weekly newsmagazines and polite company, our responsibility first and last.

So our nanny moves on and so do we. We’ll still need help for sure. Business trips come up. The parent-child ratio is about to swing in their favor. Things change. Hello, 2006!

Twelve months has passed since I outlined twelve resolutions towards my betterment. So, let’s do the numbers.

1. Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present.
   Sort of. I know more verbs than this time last year and I got a chance to flex my conjugator (ahem) on a trip to Rome, but the tense thing. I’m still stuck in the present. (Or, in translated Italian: I stick in the present.)

2. Get a goddamn backhand.
   Done. No more do I run a half-court’s width to ensure forehands. I am whole.

3. Fall in love with NASA again.
   I admit, I did. Michael Griffin instills confidence, the Chinese provide the neo-cold-war competitive impetus, and there’s even a presidential mandate to skedaddle out of low-earth orbit, for what that’s worth. Marsward.

4. Be nice to political bloggers.
   Pretty much. Easy now that the screaming and yeah-what-they-said cross-link lovefest has died down after the elections. I’d love to know how many political blogs withered in 2005 with no election fodder to chew on.

5. Learn to match beats when remixing.
   Believe it or not, yes. The DJ console helps, of course, but I did have to figure it out.

6. When home, watch only high-definition television programming.
   I have failed. TiVo, being standard-def (and crappy at that), is the culprit. Plus The Daily Show isn’t in high-def, so right there I’m screwed.

7. Convert all old mix tapes to MP3.
   No, and ain’t going to happen either. However, I did complete the digitization of all my old vinyl LP’s! So I consider this complete in spirit if not in letter.

8. Become able to change my son’s diaper with one hand.
   Can be done, but is not advised as it takes three times as long and often results in fecal matter where you don’t want it.

9. Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
   Not done. Could have routed myself differently I s’pose. Ah, well.

10. Avoid the Black Death.
    Plague-free, baby!

11. Get to know my nephews better.
    Uh, well. I know them better than I did this time last year. Mostly because more time has passed, but hey whatever works.

12. Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths.
    Regretfully, no. And I should be practicing since they are closed for a bit. Bad John bad.

Not bad, then. I completed 7, got 2 half-done, and only blew 3. I made significant gains from the half-year review, that’s for sure. Now to come up with a few for ’06 …

The full family rarely convenes at my parents’ house for Christmas Day any more. With our own families now and out-of-town in-laws it just doesn’t happen as often as it used to. So it is heartening to see that some traditions stand the test of time.

My mother decorates the main bathroom with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of little Santa figurines that she has found over the years. It is actually a little terrifying. Like urinating in the woods at night and knowing you’re being watched by dozens of glowing animal eyes. But one item that is always present is a set of letter blocks that spell CHRISTMAS. Inevitably at some point in the merriment someone scrambles the block into this lovely anagram. Has been going on for years. Ah, tradition.

If so, have I got some deals for you, Ascent Stage-reading faithful!

Audiotron 100 – Perfect condition. Loved intensely from uncrating to ceremonial disconnection from the mothership A/V center. Still the only networked media player that requires no server-side software. Works with any operating system. It scans your local network for MP3, WMA, and WAV files and lets you access them via the front panel, remote, or a web interface. It even has a PDA interface which is rare among networked media units. And because I’m honest with my blog readers: the only reason I am selling it is because my media is so iTunes-bound that I purchased an Airport Express and no longer need it. $100. Shipped free.

Harmon-Kardon HK3720 – Basic but powerful stereo receiver. No video bells and whistles but a great stereo receiver. Used faithfully as a second unit for whole-house audio, now not needed because my new receiver supports multiple zones. $150. Also shipped free (and that sucker is heavy).

Roku HD-1000 Photobridge – The only networked media receiver that I know of that supports component video out. Perfect for displaying high-res digital slideshows. Also supports MPEG-4 for your ripped DVD viewing pleasure. Does music too and supports custom apps. Reason I’m selling: new receiver supports photo viewing, though not networked. This makes me sad, but I have to draw the line somewhere. $110. Of course, shipped free.

Sony 100 CD Changer – Old but sturdy mega-jukebox. Optical out, plus album title display field. Reason: have not played a CD in years. $50. Shipping alone might cost as much, but for you, dear readers, it is free.

My thanks – It has been a fun year. Thanks for reading everyone! Free. Immediate download.

Contact me if you are interested.

Small enough to fit in your stocking.

(1) Is it me or is Firefox 1.5 not ready for prime time? Memory usage spikes, random shutdowns, and of course the obligatory extension-busting. Still the best by far, but couldn’t it be, um, better?

(2) There will be one extra second in 2005, owing to a miniscule slowdown in the Earth’s rotation. Is it time to decouple our timekeeping from geophysics and just use our atomic clocks? And what are you planning to do with the extra time?

(3) There are seven (colored) lines on the Chicago L transit system. There are seven notes in major, minor, and modal musical scales. There are 144 stations currently in operation, a number easily divisible by the 12 tones of the Western chromatic scale. If this isn’t begging for some kind of orchestral arrangement where actual train cars passing through stations over time trigger notes, then I don’t know what is. See also: Projects 2006.

(4) I’m headed to Istanbul early next year. Suggestions on what to see, what to eat, where to smoke the hookah?