After more than a year of quiescence, I'm "pleased" to bring you another installment of The Docket of the Absurd. I suppose there have been plenty of cases I could have talked about over the past year (don't even get me started about the iron-fisted cartels of the movie and music industries). But this case is particularly absurd, and reading it this morning I was compelled to issue a rant on the subject.

We have seen many frivolous patent infringement lawsuits in the tech industry. There have been fewer trademark infringement cases, and these are typically even more inane. In this case, Intel is going after a small yoga organization in California. The organization's name is "Yoga Inside", where "inside" refers to the fact that they're bringing yoga to schools and correctional facilities. Apparently, this name infringes on Intel's "Intel Inside" mark. Intel feels that any word followed by "inside" is derivative of their mark, which achieved its popularity through a great deal of advertising money. Such a combination of words therefore dilutes the effectiveness of the mark, and hurts Intel's bottom line.

Okay, give me just a small break. To establish trademark infringement, you have to show that the infringing mark is drawing business away from you. In fact, businesses in unrelated sectors can have identical names, because there's no danger of consumer confusion. So Intel needs to show that people are getting mixed up, and accidentally purchasing yoga services instead of computer chips. (In reality, it's a little more subtle -- Intel will use a newer and more workable defense, one that protects large companies when little guys copy their trademarks just to cash in. Still, their case rests on the use of the common word "inside".)

Now, Intel claims that they're obligated to pursue this case, because trademark law requires you to enforce your trademark or lose it. But this is an idiotic excuse -- there are alternatives. When you decide whether to go after a company, you should compare the following two possibilities:

• The difficulty of proving in court that the current case constitutes trademark infringement
• The difficulty of proving, in the prosecution of some later case against a different company, that the current case doesn't constitute trademark infringement

Do you get me? Let's say that in a year, Intel has to deal with an actual infringement case from some chipmaker FooCorp. If they go through the trouble of whacking Yoga Inside, then sure, they'll have no problem with FooCorp. If they leave Yoga Inside alone on the other hand, then they simply have to face the remote possibility that FooCorp will use Yoga Inside to establish that Intel wasn't maintaining its mark. It seems to me that Intel would have an easier time showing that Yoga Inside doesn't infringe than showing that it does, and so a well-meaning yoga organization could be left alone. Of course, that's not the way these things happen. Intel has lots of money and many lawyers, and can probably grind Yoga Inside into dust. We can only hope that Yoga Inside has the resources to make what should be a very simple defense in court.

Over the past year or two, Nath has volunteered off and on at the cat shelter where we originally got our cats. For a while, this consisted of going to the shelter early in the morning and cleaning out litterboxes, administering medication, and generally preparing the place for human visitors. A thankless job I suppose, but Nath got a lot of cat-time, and we all know that virtue is its own reward. She also came home every week with a week's supply of cat food, so everybody wins.

As much fun as cleaning out litterboxes may be, Nath can't offer her services any more. Women in her condition should not get too close to litterboxes, for fear of being exposed to toxoplasmosis, a well-known teratogen (man, I've always wanted to use that word). Nevertheless, she's been kind enough to take on a less nitty-gritty duty. She has a list of people who recently adopted cats but failed to make use of the coupon for spaying/neutering. Her job is to call them up and find out why not, encouraging them to get it done and offering a replacement coupon if they lost the original. Bob Barker would be proud.

There's one major problem with this task: Cat People. We all know what cat people can be like. Nath and I are cat people, for cryin' out loud -- we had to cave in and admit it when we bought that big cat jungle gym thingy. Now imagine that your job is to call an endless succession of residences that are very likely to contain cat people. When the cat person answers the phone and hears that it's the shelter calling (with a simple question), they know that they have a captive audience, one that would just love to hear all their crazy cat stories from the past couple of years. At last! Someone whose eyes (or ears, anyway) won't glaze over when I tell all my cat stories! The end result is that a call that would take ten seconds if Nath were discussing vinyl siding takes ten minutes because of the peculiar subculture she's dealing with.

Happily, most of these people have in fact gotten their cats fixed in the interim. Thank goodness -- we don't want to have a population explosion of cat people wandering the streets. To paraphrase Bob Barker, "Help control the pet fancier population -- have your pet spayed or neutered."

In December, doctors discovered a benign growth in Nath's abdomen. Apparently, treatment is unnecessary. We have been told that in these cases, the growth consumes energy and continues to develop for about nine months, and is then naturally ejected by the host body. I was told not to worry, that the condition isn't communicable and that as a male, I was immune in any case.

What I'm getting at, of course, is that we're going to have a baby. I do apologize if you haven't already heard this news from us directly. If you haven't, then maybe you're some stranger who has found this site through a mysterious chain of links, in which case, hello! I'd be most curious to find out who you are and how you found this site.

For anyone keeping track, we're beginning the seventeenth week, with a due date at the start of September. We heard the heartbeat for the second time last week. Next week is the first ultrasound. Everyone here at thingo central is happy and healthy. Including young Zebulon -- that's the pre-release code name we're using.

The fact that I'm only mentioning the whole pregnancy thing now points out an interesting distinction between me (Mr. Thingo) and Craig (his alter ego). Like Nath, Craig had no problem going around and broadcasting news of Zebulon to everyone who cared (or didn't care) to listen, as soon as Nath's pregnancy was established. But I (Mr. Thingo) was somewhat more reserved in making any announcements, choosing to adhere to the accepted wisdom of waiting until the end of first trimester, and then failing to post on the subject until now out of inertia. Why this strange dichotomy? The two alter egos usually agree so well on editorial policy. Perhaps I-as-Thingo take a more conservative, long-term point of view, believing that information, once created, cannot be destroyed, and refrained from posting a fact that could, in the uncertain first trimester, be rendered false. Perhaps I chose to balance Craig and Nath's exuberance with well-mannered restraint. Perhaps I didn't want to jinx it. Perhaps this metaphysical duality is wigging you out.

But look at me. Going on about ideas only peripherally related to this great time in our lives, bending an event of great importance to my long-winded whims. Enough of that. The fact is that this whole thing is incredibly exciting, the pinnacle in a year that is and will continue to be full of life-changing events. And we're almost halfway there. Come on, Zebulon!

Incidentally, you should feel free to send me suggestions for names. I'm always interested in hearing good ideas. The winning suggestion will be tattoed onto Zeb's forehead at birth. Or maybe I'll just post good names here. I'll get back to you on the tattoo idea. Apparently I've got to learn how to keep the Child Services people away.

[update: 25 March at 14:00]: Whoops -- Nath reminds me that we're entering the eighteenth week, not the seventeenth. My bad.

It's always hard to purchase electronics. I mean, it's absurdly easy to click a few times on a web page and have said electronics stuck in a box and sent to you. But it's hard to decide that it's finally time to buy some particular gadget, knowing that gadget 2.0 will hit the stores the following week for half the price.

Digital cameras are just such a gadget. They're getting cheaper and more megapixelicious every day, but I was really hurting for a convenient way to capture travel photos, research results, and endless pictures of cats. Old-fashioned analog cameras just weren't cutting it for me anymore. So after a long time stuck in a holding pattern, I finally decided to acquire a digital camera. I picked the Nikon Coolpix 995, a fairly recent addition to the Coolpix line. I've been pretty happy with all the Coolpix cameras I've tried, and I was confident this camera would work for me.

Now, I could start being Mr. Photographer, and try to have a photo-of-the-day entry here at thingo central, but I doubt that would last more than, well, a day. Maybe two. Of course, I'm excited to post photos when I get the opportunity to take them, so watch this space. In the meantime, I feel obligated to include at least one test photo while I'm working on learning the camera. So here's a gratuitous shot of Ginseng (cats are such willing subjects). Click on it to get a much larger version, and bask in the megapixels.

So Nath and I got married.

Nath and I have been together for a long time, and neither of us ever saw any particular value in getting married. We already had everything we could ever want in our relationship. To us, marriage never represented a next milestone, a higher level, a sacred institution, a public declaration, a divine covenant, or even a path to self-delusion, to name some of the usual reasons people get married. Still, we agreed that we would happily get married if circumstances required it for legal or logistical reasons. With uncertainty approaching about where we'll be living by the end of the year and whether Nath will want to be working at the time, the necessary circumstances finally presented themselves and marriage seemed like the natural way to obviate any future difficulties.

So eighteen days ago, Doug and I met Nath and Julie at the courthouse, and as Doug and Julie witnessed, we were wed by a very nice judge in her office. The ceremony was simple and sweet, unadorned but with a touch of class courtesy of the judge (certainly not thanks to me). A further bit of class was provided by Julie, who thoughtfully brought a lovely white bouquet for Nath to hold, perhaps to steady her hands in the absence of some knitting to hold on to.

I'm happy to say that since then, absolutely nothing has changed. We went out for a lovely dinner that night. Two days later, I left for my interview. Everything is exactly the same between us, which is to say great. In this respect, I certainly claim some allegiance to Algernon from The Importance of Being Earnest (whom I played), who said, "If I ever get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact."

I would like to take a moment to apologize to family members who, just when they were becoming resigned to the fact that we weren't planning on getting married, were suddenly shocked by our sudden reversal. And I would like to thank other family members who found the whole situation tremendously funny.

Recently, my father's accounting firm merged with another firm. Now they're a larger firm, known collectively using a whole bunch more names. But we should be thankful -- they could have gone with a putrid new-agey name like Accenture (perhaps "Accounture"?) or Clarica.

Anyway, while I was in Montreal, my dad took me on a tour of their new office space. It's quite lovely and will serve them well in the years to come. But by far the most exciting aspect of the tour was the office furniture. There was nothing remarkable about the furniture itself, except perhaps that it's mostly attractive natural materials like wood and leather instead of nasty, repulsive, evil modern office synthetics that give off volatile gases and retard flames from half a mile away. No, what's most interesting is the furniture's provenance. It was all acquired from a sell-off of office equipment from a company that was going out of business. A certain Houston company. A failed energy trader. Enron.

Apparently, the fact that the furniture (alas, no shredders) comes from Enron isn't especially interesting up in Canada. Here in the US, a country that revels in personal and corporate schadenfreude, it's tremendous. I am personally pleased and proud that my father, in a very indirect and irrelevant way, is tied up in the Enron scandal. So far, there have been no side-effects of having purchased the cursed furniture. Business hasn't suffered, as far as I can tell. They haven't found any incriminating secret documents stuffed way in the back of a drawer. Still, you have to wonder. Did the money from the sale go to further line the pockets of the piggish Enron execs? Did Kenneth Lay once sit at what is now my dad's conference table and say, "gentlemen, we're screwed". Will potential clients recognize the furniture when they visit and scurry away in a panic? Doubtful. I just hope that they don't buy their ledger paper from K-Mart.

I would just like to take a brief pause to salute Steven Bradbury, Australian speed skater and author of my new favourite sports moment:

At the start of the final for men's 1000m short-track speed skating, the racers were lined up and I called it for the Australian. I didn't know how he was going to win, but I decided he would. In the final lap, a pack of four was rounding the curve to the finish line with Bradbury trailing a quarter lap behind. Then something went wrong and they all crashed. All except Bradbury, that is, who was astute enough to lag behind, and skated nonchalantly through the carnage to collect his gold medal. Way to go!

By the way, if anyone happens to know a URL for a video of the race, please let me know and I'll post it here.

The search for an academic job is fraught with uncertainty. Your potential future is smeared over an enormous geographic region and a range of lifestyles, and subject to whims and accidents of timing. The decision to interview an applicant is based on a huge number of unknowable factors, with a healthy dose of word-of-mouth and networking thrown in. And you only get one chance -- if your energy is a little off when you give your job talk, you make a bad impression and lose your opportunity. In short, the job search begins with the creation of a huge amount of confusion, followed (hopefully) by the gradual winnowing of confusion, until your destiny is known.

My own personal search began with relatively low uncertainty. I applied to a small number of schools: seven, compared with dozens for most of the other graduating students in my department. I just couldn't abide the idea of a long, drawn-out season of endless interviews at schools I didn't care about. However, my first interview resulted in a job offer, which only serves to intensify the uncertainty of the rest of the process. Of course, I should say that while the future is still in limbo, it's a very happy limbo: I have a job offer at a good school! This is excellent news, as it establishes a baseline of goodness for the future.

Yesterday brought news of a mixed nature. I heard back from the one US school I applied to. They made an offer to one of their candidates and it was accepted. Their interview process is over. Now this is a shame -- I've heard nothing but great things about this school, I thought I had a good chance of landing an interview there, and it seemed like a school and region I would enjoy. On the other hand, this news represents a significant decrease in uncertainty, and in that sense can only improve my general disposition. Given that I already have an offer, I can no longer be too upset about losing an opportunity at another school.

Doug pointed out the poignant and far-reaching corollary to this news: we're definitely going back to Canada! I suppose this doesn't affect the overall search that much, but it's a pretty strong psychological change. We know what country we'll be in, and it's our home country. The terre de nos aïeux. Mind you, we could still end up at either extreme end of the second-largest country in the world, but I like to think that the playing field has been narrowed a bit.

More updates on my status as events warrant.