Author Archives: Tim Elhajj

Aug 06 2008
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movies

After Life

If you’re interested in memoir, you might enjoy After Life, a Japanese film from about ten years ago.

The setup is that when you die, have three days to pick a memory that will then be turned into a film. This film then accompanies you into all eternity.

Much of the movie is shot as a documentary, so it’s a little slow in parts. There are counselors in this stage of life, who are tasked with helping the newly dead decide on a memory. There is no judgment hour in this hereafter. One of the new guys even makes a joke of it. “What, no hell? This is it?”

If there is no hour of judgment, the counselors do their best not to judge the dead people either, but this is where the film really shines. You can’t help but judge the people as they reveal themselves through their memories: one is a prostitute, another a lecherous old man (If you wait to pick your prostitute until 11 O’clock, you get a better bargain!), another a boring old man.

At least, I felt justified sizing up each of the newly dead, based on their memories. But as I watched the story unfold through the character’s memories, I realized not everyone is who they might seem. The memories are all true, but the context is everything.

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Aug 04 2008
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A New Day

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I’ve moved my blog to the WordPress.com site, but I am still using my domain name (telhajj.com). Hopefully the transition has been as smooth for you as it has been for me. The telhajj.com domain should already be resolving to the new server, but If that doesn’t work (and you can somehow read this), you can always try timelhajj.wordpress.com.

Why did I switch? It started with this:

Operation Aborted

I had a technical problem with Internet Explorer 7 that I couldn’t resolve. Whenever I visited the site in IE7, I got the dialog above. If you click OK, IE7 closes the page and displays a generic HTML error page. Nice.

Hosting your own blog on a server is like owning your own house: when something goes bad, you have to fix it. The technical contact at my Web host is a smart guy, but there is always this tension between his problems and your problems. He is willing to fix his (and by that I mean anything related to the server), but you’ve got to fix your own issues with the site or convince him of your helplessness. Certainly the Internet Explorer problem I was experiencing with the site was a Microsoft problem (the Operation Aborted bug). But that didn’t help me, nor did it explain why I was having the problem from every computer on my network. Eventually I realized I could have disabled javascripting in Internet Explorer to work around the problem, but that didn’t explain how it came to be. The next morning Patrick, from POE Hosting (That’s Portal of Evil Hosting—literally THE best name in Web hosting), resolved the issue by removing, as he put it, “the broken symlink” in my wp-content folder. 

Who broke it? Who knows! But it seems to have somehow resolved the Operation aborted error (who writes the names for these error messages?)

My contract with POE is about to run out next week. I have had my domain with them since 2002 but this issue made me realize DIY isn’t my bag for hosting. Patrick is smart as a whip, but he often sends me cryptic emails. “Do you have any cron jobs running?” he might ask. Or maybe, he’ll say, “Check your .htaccess.” I can do Google searches and figure out what he’s telling me, but that means I have less time to blog. I wrote him over the weekend and said, “I just want to blog. I don’t care about any of this Linux nonsense.”

And so here I am.

For the most part, most people will never even realize much has changed (unless you’re logged into your own WordPress.com account and see the little banner above my site). Otherwise, it’s all pretty transparent.

WordPress.com seems like a good deal. It costs me ten bucks to host my blog here with my domain name. If I didn’t want to redirect to my domain, it would have been free. My Web host was going to charge me $60 for another year. I’ve transitioned the mail over to Google Apps for Domains, so you can still send me mail at my domain.

I’ve lost the ability to host a fancy flickr page built into my blog (which was a pretty popular page on the old site). I’ve lost all my links, but I think that can be repaired. The import from the old site was pretty painless. To celebrate the switch, I’ve renamed the site.

I may experiment with a few more design changes before I’m through.

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Jul 31 2008
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family

Pavilion love

Holly has a new post up at her site. It’s a cute story about Aaron. Everyone go look all at once and crash her server!

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Jul 30 2008
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family

How to Make a Girl Who Just Joined the Swim Team Happy

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With an athlete like Aaron in the family, Kennedy is always getting the short shrift. It’s not that Kennedy isn’t an athlete. She just has a much different approach to sports than Aaron. But swim team is the right sport for her. With all the kids milling about, the meets feel more like afternoon picnics than sporting events, and Kennedy really thrives in this kind of environment. She’s also pretty fast in the water.

I was explaining all this to my in-laws last week at the reunion. Kennedy was within earshot. I said I remembered standing on the side of the pool and noticing an enormous rooster tail of water making its way from one end of the pool to the other.

Grandpa Jim raised his eyebrows and nodded his head.

I told them I couldn’t figure out what it was, but it looked like a motor boat and it was getting all the parents in front of us wet. The rest of the swimmers were cheering.

I asked Holly what it was and she said, ‘Silly man. That’s your daughter.’

All the in-laws smiled and politely shooed off my tall tale, but I didn’t care. I was watching Kennedy, who looked up at me with her googly eyes and a smile that just wouldn’t quit.

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Jul 29 2008
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movies

Call it!

Just saw Dark Knight. Someone should make a movie where Harvey Dent faces off against Anton Chigurh. Now that would be an awsome movie.

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Jul 28 2008
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family

Huckeba Sager Hood River Family Reunion

Every other year my mother-in-law and her sister organize a family reunion at a different destination. This year it was in Oregon’s Hood River valley.

We had a great view of Mount Hood from our front porch.

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The Colombia River wasn’t a far drive.

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We hiked up Beacon Rock, which has a lot of man-made switchbacks, rails, and bridges and looks a lot like a pachinko machine.

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 Some of us leapt into adventure on Hood River.

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Others of us were content to sit on the sidelines.

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Never disparage the sidelines. You never know what sights you might see. This woman and her three cattle dogs stole my imagination.

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But the highlight of these sort of things is always meeting family and friends for a few days.

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Jul 27 2008
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family

Company Picnic

I took the kids to the company picnic yesterday. Thirty-thousand geeks, 3 days in July, 1 farm nestled in the foothills of the Cascade mountains: Big fun. 

The afternoon started off with motorcycle daredevils on a twenty foot ramp.

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The sky grew dark, but no daredevils were lost.

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The children were impressed.

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In boot-camp, they said the smoking lamp was lit and it meant you could have a cigarette whenever you wanted to light up. The first time I heard it, I wanted to know where this lamp was. I wanted to keep my eye on it. On the way to the park, I told the kids that if they ate a good lunch, the soda lamp was lit for the rest of the afternoon. Both their eyes got big as cans of pop. Neither asked to see the actual lamp.

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We played games.

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We waited in lines.

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Went on rides.

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And then the soda lamp was extinguished.

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Jul 21 2008
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writing

Raymond Carver on Insight

What good is insight? It only makes things worse.

-Raymond Carver.

I found this lovely Carver quote in a wonderful little book about how to write memoir by Abigail Thomas called, Thinking About Memoir.

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Jul 15 2008
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family

In Celebration of Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Aaron has a knack for hitting the ball. He’s so good, his nickname is A-bomb. He made it into the Little League All Stars this year, so earlier this month, we deocrated all our cars for the big tournament. Recently I’ve been getting strange looks at stop lights.

On my driver’s side rear window, I drew a little mushroom cloud and wrote, “GO A-BOMB!”

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Jul 14 2008
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Tracking Visitors to Your Blog

Last week I was traveling for business (something I rarely have to do) and I learned that I am not the only one from my company that visits my blog. How did I know this? I use three different packages to track visits to this site. Why three? Each offers something a little bit different.

SiteMeter: Gives me immediate feedback about visits. There is even a link that tells you who is accessing the site right now(it shows visits from the last 20 minutes). Once I emailed a story submission to an editor who I knew lived in a certain town in Massachusetts. Later that week that very same Massachusetts town lit up on my SiteMeter chart. Not long after, that very same editor offered me some good news about my submission. Gotta love that kind of feedback.

WordPress.com Stats: This is an essential add-on widget for WordPress. The user interface is good for getting an idea which blog posts are most popular and seeing which strings are used in searches on your site.

Google Anylytics: Good for analyzing trends. Lovely user interface. For some reason the cities and towns that light up on SiteMeter don’t always light up on the Google Analytics map. I have no idea why this happens, but it’s annoying. I haven’t spent much time with this yet.

You never know what you’ll find when you start tracking visits to your site. I had always thought all those visits from my company’s domain where my own visits. As for you visitors from the company (you know who you are), leave some comments already. I know you’re out there.

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