The weather is unseasonably warm for January here in Champaign, Illinois. If I had been ahead on my hours at my day job I'm might have blown off the majority of the workday to indulge in the unexpected niceness outdoors. Instead I slogged through a testing document checking off each arcane item.

I had mentioned to Nian that I was having a little trouble focusing on my day job these days. I currently have a big video upgrade project in the works at the Canopy Club that is on my mind a lot. I also find that has the page hit numbers for BNL have been steadily going up (a recent phenomenon), so too am I distracted by trying to think up new interesting things to write about. Then there's the whole -- my Chinese wife Nian is still in china and we are trying to jump through the INS hoops to finally be together -- thing. Still I gave "The Man" his eight hours of sweat and blood (you all know how easy it is to work up a heavy sweat while typing away at a computer terminal) and now I'm in blogging mode.

There is a lot I could do with the REBUSizer gadget I added to the top of my blog and to my toy section in the left sidebar, but so far no one other than myself has used it (*sniff*). In fact a number of possibly interesting projects have occurred to me recently, but I don't know if I should invest the time in pursing them. REBUSizer had a number of improvements planned, but due to lack of apparent visitor interest, those are on the back burner. The BaBeLiZeR does one CNN headline by default each time it is visited in addition to the visitor's phrase. I had been thinking about BaBeLiZiNg all the Headlines once a day, and possibly BaBeLiZiNg the current David Letter Top Ten List as well, but perhaps the front page of the blog is already getting too cluttered a look already if I put them there. A more important project would be something I call Monkey-Typewriter which has the possibility of being a teaching tool as well, so I really need to move that one up on the to-do list. That one has been pending for over six months.

Having been taking some playful jabs at organized Christianity recently in my Slashdot DumbSwede Journal essays, I had planned to balance things up a bit with an essay on the apparent contradictions in Islamic goals and actions. That essay is still unwritten, but with bin Laden mouthing off again just today I can't resist commenting on his offer of a truce. Now in one sense he must have known there was no way the U.S. or more specifically President Bush would take him up on the offer, so it was probably largely offered in an effort to appear reasonable to the rest of the world. But if the President had decided to accept the offer, how would he proceed? Bin Laden and al Qaeda claim to speak for the Nation of Islam, but of course the Nation of Islam has no standing in the United Nations, because, well, because it isn't really a Nation. Whether waging war in Iraq was a good idea or not, one can't help but boggle at the idea of bin Laden offering a truce. You know with God on bin Laden's side you'd think he'd be in a stronger bargaining position. I'm sure bin Laden thinks God is mad at him for not knocking down his divinely allotted quota of tall buildings.

Nian's Visa forms still haven't arrived yet. Nian has sent them out to me last Thursday in China (Friday here across the International Date Line) so I can bundle them with my half. So let's call this Day 6 of the NVF Watch (Nian's Visa Forms Watch).

My gym going has been sporadic since Nian went back to China to say the least, especially with the Lung Surgery in December (queue violin music). But the nighttime upgrade project at the Canopy has to wait till Sunday to progress due to some last minute scheduled shows, so I managed to get in a good workout tonight after work. The aerobic portion of my workout was especially heavy, the last mile of which was spent on the highest setting of the stair-machine -- the sweat dripping off of me in heavy rivulets in exactly the way it doesn't at my office desk job. Leaving the gym I could smell my own fresh muskie order. Hopefully I wasn't too offensive in order. I suspect fresh sweat is easier to tolerate than stale sweat that has wicked into one's clothing. Nian has greeted me home fresh from the gym in the past; I don't remember her saying anything one way or the other about whether my smell was repellant. She recent confessed to smell the clothing I left behind in China to help rekindle her memories of our physical closeness. Hopefully when she returns I will establish some kind of routine that makes for regular gym going. Whether she enjoys it when I have a fresh sweat order I will try to get an answer to later tonight.

I have complained (more like whined) to Nian about not being able to get all the things done I wanted to do these days, to which she reminded me about how I had planned on going to Graduate School early in our relationship. If I can't deal with the little diversions I currently have, she commented, how would I deal with Graduate School as well? Her admonishment wasn't that I shouldn't do it, but rather that I appeared to be on a trajectory to never get it done.

Our company IPO got delayed by 3 months, so I'm sitting on 60K worth of stock and 35K of debt. Even after the IPO and the expected April dividend payment I will still probably be 15K in debt. Add 3 months to that before I can sell any of the stock due to IPO trading holds and that brings us up to July. My current lease is up in August and I had hoped to buy a House for Nian, Aiai our daughter, and myself -- the next step in my becoming a responsible adult, husband, and father. It's going to be a nail biter financially the next six months or so. Still I hope to come out of this smelling like a rose (as opposed to my current sweaty gym going smell). As I mentioned earlier above, I confessed to Nian that I'd been having a little trouble focusing at work. Since she will have to give up her University position to join me here in America this all has her very nervous about our financial future.

Well this has been a long enough and certainly rambling enough post for tonight. Tomorrow maybe I'll be able to come up with one solid firm coherent topic.

Yesterday on Fox News I saw someone promoting a book dealing with the "Top Ten Science Myths" and it got me to thinking about the possible oxymorons here. Many might consider Fox News an oxymoron, and also the realization that if you're tenth on a Top Ten list then you're really at the bottom. But the idea of a "Science-Myth" struck me as the real oxymoron. Granted we know the intent -- something generally believed to be science but isn't. Still it is the literal application of the phrase that gets us in trouble as with all oxymorons. Since most myths are dispatched with science, how does one dispatch a myth created with science? Of course to some, science-myth might not be an oxymoron at all, people who believe in religious dogma over science for instance, say like in the Creationism over Evolution debate.

I did a quick Google search to see if science-myth is commonly quoted as an oxymoron and ironically while science-myth and oxymoron often show up often on the same page, they don't do so directly in connection with one another. Creation-Science is often cited as an oxymoron then also labeled a science-myth, but the oxmoronicness of science-myth itself is never noted.

I thought for a second I might have invented a new word in "oxymoronicness", but oxymoronicness is cited 88 times by Google.com out there on the web. But fear not, with a little creativity and with the clever application of suffixes I can net me some new words not listed with Google.com.

Oxmoronicism: The act of doing something that is in and of itself an oxymoron.
Oxmoronicismness: The degree to which engaging in an act has the quality of being an oxymoron.
Antioxymoronicism: Oppositon to the engaging in of acts that are oxymoronic.
Antioxymoronicismness: The degree to which something has the quality of being against engaging in acts that are oxymoronic.

I could go on and on, but I'll quit with the final score BNL:4 Google:0

I have a long way to go to catch up with "truthiness", but watch out world -- I have only begun to fabricate new words!

*** Small Late Addendum: Science-Myth not listed on Oxymoronlist.com which purports to be the world's largest list of oxymorons collected online, so I'm submitting it now. Just remember you heard it hear first folks!

"Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye", that's the headline of a Nature.com article. An article with goes on to further state "Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds." Actually I would disagree that judgments are made in 50 milliseconds (1/20 of a second). I suspect persistence of vision and post processing makes it possible to make decisions on things that only appear for a fraction of a second especially when flashed between blackness to blackness, but that the decision process still takes perhaps 1/2 a second or longer.

You have probably noticed the "Blogger bar" on the top of my blog, most likely you got here by clicking "NEXT BLOG >>" on its right side from another Blogger.com maintained blog. Unlike most however you have chosen to stay on this page long enough to read this far. Most likely 9 out of 10 other click-throughs spent all of about one second deciding BNL isn't what they are looking for in a blog reading experience. While I doubt they made up their minds consciously or unconsciously in the afore mentioned 50 milliseconds, they probably still made up their minds in an incredibly short time.

I don't make this as an accusation of unfairness. I do the same when I'm out blog hopping. A conservative estimate of the number of blogs out there is 50 million. That’s a lot of potential reading. Assuming they all had a NEXT BLOG button, which most don't of course, but assuming they did and assuming the combination of your broadband service, computer, and their servers could dish up a blog every second -- it would still take nearly two years of surfing 24/7 to put your eyeballs on each of them at least once.

So fairly or unfairly ones blog has to have enough aesthetic appeal to get past that fraction of a second judging process to have any chance of the very first sentence of your blog being read at all. 50 million blogs makes for a lot of competition in the effort to grab eyeballs and attract return visitors. Still not all of them are out to get a large readership, but if only 2% were that would still make for 1 million blogs to compete with and carve out an audience.

Why should one care? I think I envy my wife's blogging-philosophy, which is that she writes for herself, alone. She only reluctantly allowed me to publish her blog's address in my sidebar, and then only because the vast majority of American and English speaking readers would be unable to read the original Chinese and be totally confused by the WorldLingo and Google translated versions. Me, I guess I've always been an extrovert. Many people enjoy playing and listening to music; I only really enjoy it when I'm D.J.ing for an appreciative crowd of club goers.

I think my main reason for blogging as an ongoing lesson in writing. Without readers and comments there really aren't any grades.

Probably I have exhausted this subject for now. I know that BNL could benefit from a facelift if it is ever to breakout from the rest of the blog crowd. I know my little gadgets and toys in the sidebar are trivial and childish compared to real games, puzzles, and free applications posted elsewhere on the web by other more capable web designers than I. But it isn't really my aim to be the next Google.com or Yahoo.com. Still I do hope someday for BNL to be recognized by a readership of a few hundred regular visitors as a true Webzine and not just another blog that goes by in a blink.

I had intended to write on a potpourri of things tonight, but I spent most of the evening working on a Slashdot.com entry entitled Drawing the Lines which is an Anti Death Penalty easy in response to the scheduled execution of Clarence Ray Allen an elderly cripple.

Nian had a very good explanation for not mentioning "The Beast" definition for Nian, which I mentioned in yesterday's post. It seems there are four Chinese words, all with slightly different pronunciations and completely different Chinese character representations that translate into English characters as Nian. In Chinese her name is NOT synonymous with "Beast" -- or at least so she tells me ;-)

If Nian can find them I will post the pictograms for the four Nians. My blog engine destroys Chinese characters when I try to post them, and you would HAVE to have Chinese characters installed on your computer for them to be viewable anyway -- thus the need for picture versions.

Tomorrow's post (which I had hoped to get to today) will be largely about trying to acquire eyeballs (getting regular readers).

Ah the things you learn at Wikipedia.org! My lovely and devoted wife Nian informs me that her name roughly translates as "missing" as in someone that would be missed when away (and I certainly do). She also brags a bit that it is a lovely Chinese name for girls and that many Chinese girls receive "ugly" names on purpose because it hides them from demons and misfortune. A karma thing I guess.

Recently however I came across a Wikipedia entry for Nian by accident while Googling around. It doesn't mention the "missing" definition for Nian.

In Chinese mythology, Nian is a beast that comes in spring. The Chinese word for year is based on the arrival of this beast. A phrase for Chinese New Year, guo nian means the passing of the beast. It is believed that it lives under the sea. It came to attack people at the same time of the year. The Chinese tradition of decorating in red, burning fire-crackers, and the lion dance with loud drums and gongs was to scare the beast away.

I'm sure this isn't an omen, but if all goes well Nian will arrive to live with me in the spring. Nian I love you, so please don't be mad with my post. You have to admit it is a little funny. Perhaps the Wikipedia entry needs an edit, which is something we can do since Wikipedia is OpenSource and editable by anyone.

If I don't post for awhile, you'll all know Nian killed me.

It's been a while since my last post, but I've been busy in the real world and in the virtual one. I've just popped my dinner in the oven as I sit down to write this and I realize there is a small story here as well, especially since this is the third time this week I've made this dish for dinner and it triggers memories from childhood. When I was at the store last weekend I picked up a big bag of frozen chicken wing parts at a bargain price. Usually when I get chicken wings I get the barbecued kind that come pre-coated, pre-cooked, but this bag is just pain chicken wing parts uncooked.

Anyway I've found an excellent way to cook them quickly in my own barbecue sauce and I'm reliving memories of eating barbecue chicken wing parts from childhood. My dad worked as a chef and for his baked-half-chicken dish of some sort at the restaurant he would break off the last two parts of the wing leaving the just the wing drumlet behind. So about twice a month he would bring home a sack of chicken wing pieces (minus the drumlets) and we would cover them in barbecue sauce and bake till done. Dad may have been a chef, but at home cooking was simple and quick.

I've spent every night this week working on getting some video equipment upgraded for use at the Canopy Club. There's still a lot of work to do, but soon I expect to be blogging about the triumphant return of the D.O.D.J. (Dirty O'l D.J.).

I had been working on a new toy for BNL -- The REBUSizer. My previous toys have not exactly been a hit, but I think I've finally got a winner here. It is still pretty unpolished, but if there is much interest in it I'll do more work on improving it. It currently works well with nouns, but verbs and adverbs leave a lot to be desired.




BNL has been under an increasing assault by spam-bots so in addition to making the REBUSizer I undertook to redo some of the other toys to make them spam resistant. Meme-Watch and Shakespeare-O-Meter had a couple of minor bugs that got fixed as well.


I came across an ID (Intelligent Design) site while doing some Google.com searches and it triggered the writing of a 2000 word essay in DumbSwede's Journal on Slashdot.org. This is sort of the second essay in a row that bashes on Christians a little, but it really only applies to a certain type of rabid, right-wing-conservative Christian that likes to push his or her religion in your face unwelcome.

More importantly than all this however is the news that Nian has finished her portion of the K3 visa application forms to come here to America and be with her husband -- me! Even after I receive them (they're in the mail) and send them out with my portion of the forms, we will still have about three or four more steps to go before she can get on a plane to join me. Still it's a start.

Well my barbecue chicken wings are done and so is this catch-up post. I'll probably be still be licking sauce off my fingers until the next post.

Yesterday marked exactly 4 weeks from the date of my lung surgery on Monday, December 5th. I had meant to get back to the gym about a week earlier which would have been a week earlier than the doctor originally recommended but who felt it would be fine given the progress of my recovery at the two week mark. A sore back, cold weather, and just plain laziness kept me from taking advantage of my doctor's faster allowed recovery schedule. There could be no excuse for missing the original back-to-the-gym permission date.

I had had a pretty good gym going routine up until shortly before going to China to get married. But then the cancer diagnosis (which turned out to be false), a quickie move in case the air of my below grade apartment was making me sick, and all the preparations for marriage. Put it all together and it had been over two months since a visit to the gym, probably closer to three.

I was worried that my new six inch plus scar, running along the ribs just below breast level, would diminish my bench-press. And that my 10-15 pound weight loss would include a good portion of muscle mass as my body fat percentage was probably only about 13 percent when I last went into the gym and which isn't a bad body fat ratio (recommended is 10-15). As you can see I do obsess about details like BMI, body fat ratio, and athletic performance. If I was able to capture the heart of a smart, beautiful women, 16 years my junior, it was probably due in part to keeping myself in above average shape and which I also credit with keeping me looking younger than my 47 years of age as well.

I set a wimpy 125 lbs. on the bench. This is called one-plate, as it is one 45-pound plate on each side of a 45-pound bar. I braced and lifted -- no problem and no pain. My personal-best doing the bench-press is 285lbs. and I had been close to that at 275 when I had last gone to the gym. I decided to try for 205, 200 being the goal, but 205 being much easier to arrange on the bar (2-45s, 2-35s, plus bar). The bench has a set of hooks that hold the bar above you at nearly full extension before bring the weight down to your chest. The point being I could extend my arms and if felt like it was too much I could just let the bar fall back into the hooks. I did one rep with 205 bringing it cleanly down to my chest and back up, but the top of the lift was a little shakey, worrying me a little and I stopped at one rep. Now just being able to do one rep always seems like a cheat to me, just something you do with speed rather than strength, so I wasn't happy. I thought about the lift and decided it was fear and not actually strain that had kept me for going for more reps. I took a short rest, repositioned and did two more clean reps at 205. I probably could have done more, but it was enough to prove to myself that I could have done more. 225 (two plates) would probably been doable, but I didn't have a spotter and I had already proved to myself I hadn't lost all my lifting ability. Plus I really had promised Nian not to "push" it.

Next up on my quest to test my recovery was chin-ups. I had been able to reliably do over 30 chin-ups before my surgery. Between the ages of 24 and 26 while in the Marine Corps my best chin ups was maybe 16 and I never done more than 12 during boot camp. 20 chin-ups are considered a max set of chin-ups in the Marine Corps. Oddly I worried more about my chin-ups than my bench press. I was worried that the rapid kipping motion I use to do an efficient chin-up would my strain my side, so I took slower reps than normal. I didn't feel a strain, but I held to a slow but steady motion with no rests. At 21 reps I stopped. I might have been able pump out 22 or 23 if I had strained, but I had proved to myself what I had wanted to, which is that if I where still in the Marine Corps I would easily be able to meet the physical requirements. Not bad for a 47-year old man recovering from lung surgery.

I did a half dozen Nautilus machines all upper-body then moved onto treadmill and stair-machine. Again I worried that I might have lost a lot of my hard won gains, but I put in 3 miles on the stair-machine and a mile on the treadmill at a pace that brought a heavy sweat. No shortness of breath, no pain in my recently surgically assaulted lung. My stair-machine pace was good, but I didn't really push the treadmill past a fast jog. In the 30 minutes on the stair-machine and 10 minutes on the treadmill I had managed 4 miles which had been my goal. I usually do anywhere from 4 to 10 miles. 4 not just being my usual lower limit for a good workout, but the distance either one of the two rovers currently on mars have been able to manage in their now two year stay. I'm not sure what kind of jock worries about being able to match the two year performance of the mars rovers "spirit" and "opportunity" in one visit to the gym, but this really was part of the equation of the goal I had set for myself.

All and all not a bad show. No gym today, I find I'm getting a little stiff now after 24 hours have gone by, but I just did 55 pushups (my PB is about 75) and plan on going to the gym again tomorrow.

This all gives me hope I'll be back to my personal-bests in not more than a few months. At 47 I'm now waiting for the "sign" the "signal" that I've peaked and age will rob me of my slowly won and hard fought gains, but I don't think that day has come yet -- take that age! It may be a loosing battle, but I intend to hold age at bay long enough that Nian never has to regret having married an older man. Who knows, maybe I'll live forever!