Remember that one part in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil"--the part where the technicians come to fix Sam's faulty heating system, but Robert DeNiro has already rappelled in and done a commando-style repair? "They fixed themselves," Sam claims in desperation. "They fixed themselves, eh?" sneers one of the technicians. "Machines don't fix themselves!"

This, in my experience, is true. Unfortunately, it is also true that machines and the things you make with them do sometimes break themselves. This seems to be the case with a handful of the pages I had on my website--pages that worked perfectly fine the last time I made major updates. Then, I left them alone, and they rewarded my neglect with technical petulance. I believe everything is fixed now, but feel free to drop me a comment if you notice I'm wrong.

Also, it occurred to me that creating an archives section doesn't do much good if you never archive anything. I fixed that, too; the section is now current.

I got to see my father, stepmother, and eight year-old brother this weekend for the first time in a couple of years. They were in town for this year's NAMM Show, which is an enormous music industry trade show. And I do mean enormous--there were over 65,000 registrants this year. The show was held in the Anaheim Convention Center, which is right near Disneyland, so heavy foot traffic in the area is not uncommon. However, it was easy to spot the NAMM people: whenever there was a walk signal, a sea of people in black spilled into the streets. They were worse than people at academic conferences, who, as you might know, are convinced that they won't ever get a job--let alone tenure--unless they look uniformly funereal. I don't care what anyone says; there is no "new black." Black is the new black.

Jessica, Eli, and I met for lunch in Downtown Disney and then stopped by my father's booth at the show. We said a quick hello between customers and then wandered around to check out the other booths. The drums in the above photo don't actually make any noise: you play them as you would play regular drums, but you only hear them when you put on the pair of headphones connected to them. Then, they sound very much like real drums. I think I'm going to get some brochures for that product and slip them under my drum-pounding neighbor's door.

We headed into the park in the late afternoon, made a quick stop by Toon Town for pictures with Mickey, and then played with the Innoventions exhibits. We didn't have enough time to hit all the spots we wanted to hit, so Eli and I made up for it by singing the Tiki Room song about a dozen times. I might have 24 years on him, but he's definitely my brother.