Posted by dminor
Tue, 04 Nov 2003 03:51:00 GMT
The funniest thing just happened to me. As a parent, I don’t let my kids eat all of the halloween loot that they collect. I dip into their bags every day or so and take a few out so that they won’t have that much sugar (plus I like it). Also, when I allow them to get a piece from their bags, I ask them to share a piece or two with me which they willingly do most of the time.
Tonight during dinner, we started talking about having a piece of candy after dinner. I asked how much they were going to give me and they started feeding off of each other. The numbers each of them were going to give me kept going up! When they couldn’t stand it any longer, they went to pick out the pieces they were going to give me. I think at that point, my total was around 15 pieces.
They each chose a several pieces and put before me. I praised and thanked them for sharing and for their generosity. They lit up! They started putting fist fulls of candy in front of me! When it was all over, I had 40 packages of candy in front of me. I’m not sure if it’s trick, or treat. At least I won’t have that twinge of guilt for taking candy from their pumpkins when they are not around—for a few days anyway!
Posted in Family | no comments
Posted by dminor
Mon, 03 Nov 2003 18:09:00 GMT
I stumbled upon an article titled Why You Don’t Want to Date a Programmer by Arlo Leach about the complicated personality traits bestowed upon technical types. I like to think of myself as a non-geek programmer—able to relate to people on a pretty sophisticated level and interested in people, but I really think that’s just wishful thinking. I’m pretty much a geek (albeit one who can relate to people and take interest in them). What was nice about Arlo’s expose was that I can relate to so much of what other technical people notice about themselves. Particularly:
Programming is an almost entirely cerebral activity. The only physical component is typing—and not even that, when you’re just staring at the screen trying to decipher some code. Consequently, programmers tend to lose touch with their physical needs. They’re late for meals, they forget to wear a scarf, they don’t come to bed. Bringing food or drinks will be appreciated, when it’s noticed; just don’t suggest that some fresh air or a break will help move things along.
Posted in Look Inside | no comments
Posted by dminor
Sat, 01 Nov 2003 01:24:00 GMT
Here are a couple of snaps from the beginning of our halloween adventure.
We’ve been to one house and G has counted his loot at least 6 times!
It’s 5:20 and we’ve only had 3 groups come by. We’ll be heading out soon.
Posted in Family | no comments
Posted by dminor
Fri, 24 Oct 2003 23:28:00 GMT
I crossed the border today. It no longer verges on war. War has begun.
Squirrels keep eating through the wood on my house and living inside. To make matters worse, they are very aggressive and vocal about the fact that I’m coming near “their” front porch. I don’t like it. I read that there is not much I can do except trap them. My Grandmother has been a squirrel-hunter for several years—trapping and drowning the things!
I went out the front door to get the mail today and one was on the front porch. He didn’t jump for the ground or the trees. He jumped onto the porch and ran behind a box that was propped against the house. I kicked the box, shoving it against the house again and again. I won’t go into a lot of the details, but there was a distinctive moment when he knew that the fight was over. He let out a loud repeating scream that caused squirrels in the surrounding trees to begin heckling me. He was pretty still after that, but not dead yet. I used a board to finish the job. The surrounding squirrels continued to reprimand me.
I’m left with a dead squirrel, blood on my porch, house and a box I’m supposed to return to this bedding company, and the unknown of Squirrel Retaliation or Successful Homeland Defense.
What about hanging the dead carcass on a post in the front yard as a warning to the squirrels? My neighbors probably wouldn’t mind.
Posted in House Projects | no comments
Posted by dminor
Fri, 24 Oct 2003 22:47:00 GMT
Who knows where the web is heading? There are a lot of people who have been working very hard to unify web standards and convince major corporations to follow them. It’s best for everyone.
Eric Meyer shared his thoughts on XAML which are pretty frightening. He writes:
If XAML lives up to its potential, Microsoft won’t need the W3C any more. Why should they play by the open community’s rules when they can create their own very lucrative and highly controlled gated community?
Well, that’s not the dream I have for the web! If this comes to pass, it just proves how selfish and cut-throat Microsoft really is (not that they haven’t already proven that). Sadly, that could drive me completely away from web development. That whole era of “HTML4 proprietary tag” hassle was hard enough to deal with the first time around.
Eric says, “I may, at long last, be caught in the crushing, extending embrace.” You won’t be alone Eric.
Posted in Internet | no comments
Posted by dminor
Thu, 23 Oct 2003 03:31:00 GMT
I want to wish my good friends Phil and Cara congratulations on their new baby girl, Hannah. She couldn’t have been blessed with better people for parents! We’re excited for you. (and I’m glad it’s you and not me) ;-)
Posted in Misc | no comments
Posted by dminor
Tue, 21 Oct 2003 03:22:00 GMT
My three year old is really having a tough time getting it through his mind that he is not say certain words like “stupid-head”, “pooh pooh head”, and generally “stupid” anything. I have been threatening to wash his mouth out with soap.
So tonight as the bath water is running and he is rebuking me for putting bubbles in it(?!), he puts some bubbles on his mouth and I suggest he can wash his own mouth out. He rinses off and says, “There, no more stupid words.” Which, now that I write it is only funny if you heard it. The emphasis was used like words were stupid—not saying he would not say stupid anymore.
Anyway, I had a hard time not laughing. I thought it would make a really good blog. I guess not.
Posted in Family | no comments
Posted by dminor
Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:15:00 GMT
As my business partner Doug has stated recently, Interland support for dedicated servers really sucks. Not just sucks like it could be a lot better. Better as in it couldn’t get worse.
Ever since they bought our previous provider Communitech and moved our server to their Atlanta NOC, we have had trouble with server downtime and non-support. Unfortunately, it started with a failing hard drive. They were very reluctant to replace it since most of the time it was running, but after several extended (8+ hours) of downtime and repeated techs saying “We don’t know where your server even is” and “You’re really not our customer” we finally got a SysAdmin to just build us a new box and image our failing drive to the new box.
All was good for a while. We had several more times through the short few months in Atlanta where the box would disappear for whatever reason—typically for a short period of a couple of hours. But what was bad was that disk I/O on the new server was bad. Really bad. Like 10X slower than my partner’s laptop on performance tests.
We believe the this is a result of the two drives living on the same bus. Interland support agrees with us. It took two nights of self-imposed hour long downtimes to piece together the following information. The reason that the drives were on the same bus is that the CDROM drive is hardwired as the master device on the secondary bus. Interland’s words: “Well, that’s just how we build ‘em. Two drives on the primary bus.” OK, so my request is that they ditch the CDROM and separate those drives on their own busses. They can’t seem to do that. In fact, the most recent request I’ve made for them to complete the task was responded to with this:
Hello, I have spoken with the previous admin. We will not be performing your request. You will need to upgrade your hardware. You can contact your salesperson to place the order. If you have any further concerns, please let us know. Again, thank you for contacting Technical Support. We appreciate your business. Sincerely Daniel Cooper Systems Administrator Interland, Inc. Got Questions? Get Answers: http://answers.interland.com
What?? Yeah I got questions! What are you smokin’?!? If the hardware is insufficient to handle a properly configured two hard drive system, then the hardware does need to be upgraded, but definitely not at my expense. I’ve already lost enough downtime to this issue.
So what is really going on? What has been told to us is this. Our box, although this is how we purchased it, is not their standard configuration, therefore, they are making every excuse possible not to do anything to it. Their two main gripes are 1) IDE instead of SCSI 2) Debian instead of Redhat. I didn’t put Debian on this box. It came that way. Interland doesn’t understand how Debian could have ended up on this box. Well, that’s what happens when you go out and buy up all the good providers out there. You end up with boxes configured in ways that you don’t have staff to support and customer support folks who don’t know simple technical terminology. Well boo hoo that’s not my problem. I pay these people good money for this hardware. It’s not my problem if they don’t want to support it. I’m not asking them to do any managment on the box. Just take care of the hardware.
Let this be a warning to you: Use Interland with great great caution. Approach these folks with fall back plans. As soon as I get back in my office, we’ll see what kind of response we get from the corporate side of things at Interland. The technical and customer service side of things has proven itself again and again—not in their favor.
Posted in Internet | no comments
Posted by dminor
Tue, 14 Oct 2003 03:09:00 GMT
I’ve never been one to buy up a bunch of domain names just to have them or for resale, but I find Jason Perkins’ idea for farming recently expired domain names very intriguing. So much so that I’m going to curiously watch his feed for a while. Some interesting names that popped out at me today:
- unbanded.com
- paneless.net
- artisanship.com
- warrantless.com
- discouragement.net
- supergoddess.net
Posted in Internet | no comments
Posted by dminor
Tue, 07 Oct 2003 02:34:00 GMT
Words from my wife when my 5 year old comes home saying how he can ride a bike with no training wheels. Now, we went through this in July. His friend learned so he thought he could too. He couldn’t. He was just too wobbly. We figured next summer. He was really wobbly. Today, he shocked us! He did very well. I think he has grown an inch or two since summer. I can tell that we’re going to have to keep the driveway clear of snow this winter so that he can hone his skills.
Posted in Family | no comments
