The Wilcox Family Blog

I have finally started construction on the Lego Star Destroyer (the “Holy Grail” of Lego) set that Nichelle gave me as an anniversary gift this year.

Click on the image for some photo documentation (and fun) of the project. Woo-hoo!

[isaac]Isaac, now almost 9 years old, has taken up the motto, “Geeks rule!” How it happened was like this: One night at supper John called Isaac a geek, which gave me the opportunity to explain that, in our family, geek is a compliment.

[john]I went on to point out to John that most of what he enjoys in life he owes to geekdom:

• The computer you like to use: Invented by geeks.
• The games you like to play? Written by geeks.
• The chat software you can’t live without? Also written by geeks.
• The switching system that lets you talk to your friends on the telephone? Developed by geeks.
• The standard of living we enjoy? Paid for by my own geekdom.

Isaac quickly caught on to the fact that geeks are doing the cool things in the world, and is now proud to be called one. He told me that he now prefers to say negative, instead of no, because it’s more precise.

Geeks rule!

Last night when I got home from work Nichelle could barely open her mouth, because her TMJ was acting up.

Her description of the problem was perfect, though: “It’s awful—I can’t yell at the kids.”

Nada is now what happens when we turn the key on our 1994 Buick Century Wagon. It’s got about 160,000 miles on it, and has served us extremely reliably, and we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to it. AAA is coming by later to deliver the car to our new mechanic.

At work on Friday just before leaving a great thing happened! I was modifying our demo application, and we needed to pass a parameter for a specific localization file to the right module. I coded it, cycled the server, and it worked, all in less than 5 minutes. Struts has not always been so easy, but it’s getting easier.

Naomi turned 5 months old this weekend. She is babbling more, and able to roll over now, and wants to get her hands into everything from what we’re eating for dinner to the computer keyboard. With 3 brothers, I predict her first words will be, “Mom, he’s bothering me.”

[nuke][doug]I am not normally very critical of the US government, especially having traveled a little and seeing what life in other countries is like. However, the official reactions to the pardon of Dr. AQ Khan have me completely flabbergasted.

For the record, these faults existed long before the Bush administration—in fact, there have been few times in US history when a clear foreign policy was applied consistently. Let me make a few points to illustrate why we desperately need a consistent foreign policy:

• We know that Saddam Hussein was completely evil. If he did not succeed in building weapons of mass destruction, he certainly wanted to. He is by many estimates responsible for the death of 3 million people in the past two decades. Getting rid of him was a good thing, even if some of our intelligence was bad, and the road ahead for Iraq is not going to be an easy one. But, if we apply the “threat to us, threat to others” rules to other countries, we have to overthrow the governments of North Korea (threatens Japan and South Korea; may have the capability to hit us with Nukes), Pakistan (threatens India; created a global black market for nuclear technology), and China (threatens Taiwan; helped distribute nuclear weapons technology; directly aided Communist Korea and Viet Naam in the past).
• What about the “evil dictator” rule?If we follow this, we need to eliminate Fidel Castro in our own back yard, the Saudi royal family, several African leaders, the current rulers in Haiti after the coup, etc.

So, why are we making a deal with the devil (despite claims to the contrary) in Pakistan? I will have to get back to this later.