Tonight is my company Christmas party.

Since last weekend was spent Takin’ Care of Business, I never went in to rent a suit. Becks didn’t buy a dress either. We need to be on a train in three hours if we want to go, and we’ve been leaning toward just staying home, but y’know, this only happens once a year…we’ve just gotta go.

So. In standard Dave&Becky fashion, we have launched a Grand Plan: We begged Grandma to come over and watch the baby ( to be fair, she sounded more excited than put out by this prospect), and are just about to head out to the mall to buy a suit for me and then run back to get cleaned up and changed and head to the train. It’s an hour and a half on the weekend train. We’ll arrive in the city 45 minutes early, so we’ll grab a bite to eat, then head over to the party.

We’ll be there for about two hours, then turn around and catch the next (90-minute) train back home.

It’s a sign of parental insanity: I’m actually thrilled to be running my ass off, traveling 3 hours round-trip and spending cash to buy a suit last-minute just to spend two freaking hours at a company christmas party.

The things we do for grown-up time….

…hard work pays off. I just found out yesterday that my boss had me on his short list of names (12 people) who were brought to the attention of the CIO and CEO as top performers of 2007. Of course, that means a little extra at bonus time too.

It was never really my plan to try to get on that list; I just really wanted stuff to work. I’m addicted to workahol, and I’ve landed in a place that keeps feeding the addiction. I was fearful for some time that this job would grind me down, but I’m experiencing the opposite: I’ve become increasingly Zen with the pressure/stress of the job as well as taking on even more responsibility and pressure. Of course, without my family backing me up I wouldn’t be able to focus on it so thoroughly, but they’ve been rewarding me in ways that I can then reward my family.

Anyhow, I’m babbling. I’m just thrilled that I’m somewhere that recognizes the commitment I’ve made, the personal pride of doing this job well. Thrilled, and very thankful.

I’m a technophile. I like gadgets, choose technology on its technical merits over its common usage, and enjoy ‘tweaking’ things.

My mother is a technophobe. She’s afraid that if she clicks ’send’ that the email might break the InterWeb.

And then there’s Becky. She was visibly upset when the server hosting her blog went down; last night she asked me to migrate her email to a more reliable server because the other one is still having trouble.

So I leaped into action! I myself have recently moved over to using Google Apps for Domains for my email, with the new dwink.net email address becoming the primary one, and have been tinkering with IMAP clients connecting to it and taking advantage of all the features…I’ve pored over the FAQs, gotten Mutt, Thunderbird, Evolution, and KMail all set up and ready to go, and here was my lovely wife asking me to help her do the same! Finally, she’s really interested in some of the geeking out that I do! She’s asking me to help!

I walked her through the sign-in process, showed her how to forward her other mail to the new one, and got her logged in to the Apps For Domains gmail site. “Thanks,” she said.

And now, for the coup de grace! “Baby, you can use your Mac mail program to read your email! Let me show you how to set it it up.”

Blank. Stare. “Why would I want another email address?”

“Not a new address, you can use the Mac mail program to read your dwink mail, you know, without having to go to the website! It’s nice! Convenient! Buzzword-compliant!”

“But I can use the website!”

“…yeah…but you can use this TOO!”

“No, thanks.”

In my moment of shock, horror, and dismay, it finally dawned on me. She’s didn’t care about this Cool Feature. She was just, “meh”. I married a techno-*meh*.

*sigh* Ah well, could be worse. She could be into Britney Spears or something.

If you’ve been following Mommy Wants Vodka, then you know that my father-in-law is currently in the hospital due to a heart attack earlier this week.

He’s doing great, or as great as can be expected. The ticker’s a terrible thing to have trouble with, and given that I missed out on meeting my grandfather due to his ticker crapping out on him, it’s definitely making me think a bit about family.

I grew up in a pretty traditional nuclear family. Mom, Dad, my brother, and I lived together, no divorces, no separations,  just day-to-day life. We had extended family but have never been terribly close with them; from time to time we got wedding invitations but that’s about the extent of it. So my family was always a little aloof, and this translated into our daily lives too. I love my parents, love my brother, but my life and their lives were always pretty separate; we asked for help from one another when we needed it, tried to be thoughtful and generous to each other, and made sure to get together around the holidays, but day-to-day life was in our own little bubbles.

When I met my wife, suddenly the ‘traditional’ side of things went out the window. Suddenly, I was on-track to be a stepfather, with a brother-in-law and his wife, my wife’s uncle, and other assorted characters thrown into the mix.

What happened next is what’s extraordinary: I was immediately accepted as one of this new family. Day-to-day life AND special occasions were shared, we invited each other to go to special events ( the car show, exhibits at the museums, Fry’s ), it was like an entirely new definition of ‘family’ from what I was accustomed to. And here I was, suddenly in the middle of it. It was really, well, nice.

I don’t care for the term ’stepfather’ when it comes to Ben. He’s always called me “Daver” and it means something special to him that ’stepfather’ doesn’t convey.  ‘Stepfather’ always sounds to me like I’m borrowing the father hat when Real Dad can’t be around; “Daver”, in a goofy way, has the sense of respect and caring that goes into “Dad” without commenting on biology. And you know what? Screw biology when it comes to family. Family’s more than that.

What this whole situation with Becky’s dad has me realizing is that I don’t think I care for the term “in-law” when it comes to her family either. Her dad and I go geek out at electronics stores together. I help him build computers, and he takes my side in Dave vs. Becky teasing at dinner. OVER HIS OWN DAUGHTER, he takes my side. That’s something special, and ‘in-law’ doesn’t fit.

Like Ben calls me “Daver”, I guess I’ll have to start referring to him as “J-Dawg”. Our family will know what that means…and that’s what matters.

Yesterday I took advantage of an opportunity to meet Scott Meyers and listen to him give a talk on one of his current pet projects, which involved the use of some creative C++ template meta-programming tricks to, as he put it, “generalize const“.

The talk was a lot of fun for a number of things: one, it got me thinking about the continuum between a code segment’s state of being ( having this feature ), through documenting that state as intentional (it *should* have this feature), to explicitly enforcing the requirement of that feature. Another was that it was very heartening to see the author of Effective C++ and Effective STL bang his brain against the complexity of Template Metaprogramming — now I don’t feel quite so bad when I’m digging in the bowels of boost::python or boost::mpl and end up staring at the screen and drooling — Scott’s been there too.

It also got me thinking about how iterative technology really is. Truly ‘revolutionary’ technology isn’t technically revolutionary — it’s an incremental improvement from the previous technical iteration. What makes it revolutionary is what it enables in real life. I write code all the time that uses things like std::sort, which is a relatively simple thing in itself, but it depends upon all the other things — the containers, the memory allocation, the memory manager, the bit order, the instruction set, and so on and so on down to the bare transistors simply behaving as expected. Good ol’ std::sort wouldn’t be very useful without that stuff — and each of those things were minor revolutions of their times — we’ve built on them and created meta-stuff, with meta-meta-stuff to specialize the meta-stuff.

So today I can do template magic to make the compiler do some extra work for me, and object-orientation to make my programs reflect the real world better, and I didn’t have to figure out all the details of how to make those things happen. I just had to learn how the giants before me organized it so I can reuse it.

Someday, perhaps, something that I build will be like that for someone else, a problem that I poke and prod until I come up with a solution will become another std::sort for someone to grab onto and turn a task from impossible to possible, and from possible to simple.

Whenever that happens, though, it’ll still be standing on the foundation laid by the giants who came before.

The other night I caught the YouTube-CNN Republican Debate for a few moments and was reminded of something that I’ve wanted to write down for a long time but never have:

There’s  something terrifying about politics, and it’s likely to not be what you think is terrifying.

It’s not:

• Hillary Clinton’s electability
• Nationalized healthcare
• The possibility that torture may or may not have been used at Guantanamo Bay
• Terrorism
• Iraq
• Iran
• Afghanistan
• China
• Cuba
• Britney Spears’ children

No, it’s none of the above. And probably none of the other issues people talk about in the news; it’s something darker, more subtle, more insidious.

I don’t even have a name for it. I just know that when I looked at those guys up there on that stage trying to answer questions YouTubers posted, I saw them as normal people. Homeowners, maybe well-to-do, with parents, maybe siblings, maybe wives and kids. I don’t know much about their personal lives, but they all, you know, wore clothes and probably were a little nervous, had friends who were supporting them, genuinely looking like people who wanted The Job. I’ve interviewed these people before.

And then, they opened their mouths. They became caricatures of themselves, their skin greying to the tone of newsprint and the outlines of their features bulging, twisting into place. It wasn’t Mitt Romney talking, it was The Face Of Mitt, the rough-sketch lines and distorted features happily proclaiming that he wouldn’t answer the question because it’s not, you know, a question to be answered, or something. It wasn’t a person anymore.

It’s bone-chilling to me to think that in order to lead this country you must become a political cartoon, with attendant absurdities — that you can’t be judged by the outcome of what you do, but must be judged by the look of what you say you want to do.

Imagine what it would be like at your job, if you worked under those conditions. Absolutely everything would require an opinion from you, immediately. An answer of “I need to think about it” means you’re indicisive; an answer which gives your honest opinion will be shredded in virtual print by an army of bloggers, journalists, and naysayers, and an answer that dodges the issues will be taken as a sign of incompetence.  Your face becomes the emblem of all that is wrong with the country, and your family will be scrutinized and dismissed if not up to standard, whichever standard that is.

I know that all of this is par for the course, and that it’s a necessary balancing act, providing the correct sound bites and perspective without losing votes; I recognize that it’s part of the job. It’s an awesome responsibility and no one ever said it would be easy.

But I’ve just gotta wonder: after all of this public, social bludgeoning,  is it the person running the country anymore, or is it only the opinion-page cartoon that survives?