rebootied

There is a wiki entry for the "metal umlaut" -- and it has useful information in it.
Metal umlaut - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The English word diaeresis, coming from a Greek word meaning "to divide or distinguish", refers to a diacritic graphically similar to the umlaut. This diacritic is used in languages such as Greek, French, Spanish (where it indicates a non-diphthong and thus, a real diaereisis), Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese with varying purposes; in English and some other languages the diaeresis may be employed to indicate that two vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the names "Chloë", "Zoë", or the word "naïve". Although spellings such as reënact and coöperate have largely fallen into disuse, this use of the diaeresis mark, or trema, is still used in some English-language publications.

This could also be used for Japanese people's names where they have paired vowels. Pretty neat.

Interesting weekend for me: even with the wife away on a business trip, the kids were both largely angelic... but I worked hard to make it easy for them. Saturday I made breakfast for them; the boy loves pancakes and maple syrup (the real stuff) but at some point the girl decided the smell of them makes her nauseous. In the afternoon I took them and their cousin to a children's art show where they built a giant cardboard fort while I looked at a bunch of kids' work on the walls. We had an early dinner and then attended karate for two hours.

During that Saturday I managed to chalk up a number of injuries; I nearly fell down the steps again while trying to close a window on the landing. Pulling rice out of the microwave, a jet of steam opened up on one finger and gave me a searing jolt. Then I went to karate and hurried into a very bad backward roll; managed to conk my own head as well as put my 94kg weight onto my neck. Then one of my favorite black belts gave me a 10 minute clinic on resisting his joint locks, which mostly turned out to be ways to make me squeak like a bagpipe.

Everyone slept pretty well that night, though I was still paranoid about mosquitoes after that other incident.

Sunday morning, the girl rose earlier than the rest of us and helped the neighborhood kids gather and centralize newspapers for recycling. As a reward, she was able bring one of her friends over for the afternoon and play. In the evening my mom-in-law took all of us to a hotspring for a soak and dinner. This spring is about 30 minutes drive into the mountains, and has air that is more cool and clear than near our home; soaking in the outdoor tubs is something I could do for hours. Dinner was great; I had a smörgåsbord of various pickles and a little grilled fish, as well as some spicy tebasaki and some cool nihonshuu served from a chilled shoot of bamboo. Lovely. It was a great way to get all of us recharged for the week ahead of us. Only a few more days until I get my wife back.

(And in the "this cannot possibly fail" category, I'm thinking of making a hard rock band with costumes made out of steak and ribs and calling it MEATALLICA.)

My family, probably like most of your guys' families, are fond of forwarding chain emails to me. I used to ask them to stop, but they never understood why, and I finally just chose to not care about them. I rarely get pissed off at chain emails anymore, but this really irked me:

( chain email text, lame-ass formatting intact )

OpinionJournal - Taste:

Many academics would consider my lack of manliness a good thing. They regard boys as thugs-in-training, caught up in a patriarchal society that demeans women. In the 1990s the American Association of University Women (among others) positioned boys as the enemies of female progress (something Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her book, "The War Against Boys"). But the latest trend is to depict boys as themselves victims of a testosterone-infected culture. In their book "Raising Cain," for example, the child psychologists Don Kindlon and Michael Thompson warn parents against a "culture of cruelty" among boys. Forget math, science and throwing a ball, they suggest--what your boy most needs to learn is emotional literacy.