BeMused

Not much out of the usual has been going on, hence the lack up updates. Mostly it’s been snippets of thoughts that I always think about writing down. Figured I’d share what I had.

—

Watched the debate last night. I think it’s the first full debate I’ve sat through. I don’t see how you can see those two men sitting there, explaining their policies and think that McCain is the right choice. Watching McCain sitting there, flustered and agitated and go on the offense, while Obama sat composed and collected (and admittedly, a bit on the defense at first), it makes me wonder how soon McCain would suffer a stroke from the pressure if elected President.

—

There’s two words that should strike fear into the hearts of not only Americans, but world-wide: President Palin.

—

Received a newsletter from a group downstairs that they wanted posted on the internal website. Took a half-hour and structured it properly. The result was 289 lines of code. Took the same document and did a “Save as HTML” in Microsoft Word. That came up to 3865 lines of code. I consider that a half-hour well spent.

—

Two Bodies of Mass Cannot Occupy the Same Spot #1: To the lady driving the SUV while on her cell phone and brushing her hair; do me a favor and check your mirrors, look over your shoulder, anything to make sure I’m not in the spot you’re currently trying to occupy.

—

For those Windows users that want to switch to Mac but are tied to expensive programs (namely Adobe’s Creative Suite), Adobe now has a competitive cross-upgrade program that lets you upgrade from Windows CS3 to Mac CS4.  They don’t seem to advertise the cross-upgrades that much and they’re only available when purchasing the upgrades over the phone (800-833-6687). But if you’ve been wanting to go to Mac, why not go and upgrade to CS4 (Aside from the obvious cost!)? via TUAW

—

Kung-fu bicycle fight. This is what the intertubes were made for.

—

I’ve been researching CMS’s for work. Which means ASP/NET based CMS’s, as opposed to PHP, which I’m used to. There are a lot more free/low-cost PHP-based CMS’s than ASP (at least that I’m familiar with). And some of those ASP solutions cost as much as $90,000. For that much money, it better design and program itself, follow up on sales leads, integrate seamlessly with the CRM system, never crash, and get me coffee.

—

Two Bodies of Mass Cannot Occupy the Same Spot #2: Don’t scowl at me because I almost hit you on your bicycle. You’re supposed to stop at stop signs just like the rest of traffic. If you’re going to ride in traffic, obey the rules!

—

Evernote is a cool little app -  I used it to capture some of these thoughts so I wouldn’t forget them

—

Fall is here! Great riding weather, and hopefully, if I get off my ass, great picture taking opportunities. The wife’s been bugging me again about more pictures.

—

Best example of a tange getting all tongueled up: “A fresh of breath air” - from McCain at last night’s debate.

And that’s it for now!

I’ve always been unorganized. I’ve tried several different ways to keep things organized, but I’ve never stuck with one. As a result, I have task items and calendar notifications in Outlook, AOL.com and Google. I have Post-It notes everywhere. I have scraps of paper I scribble on. I have a Franklin Planner that I write in religiously…for three days or so, and then it gets buried under the scraps of paper and Post-It notes. I need to find a way to organize pretty much my life in general. Anyone have any tricks or tips or thoughts? What do you use to organize? Do you follow the GTD crowd? Do you use a PIM of some sort?

I bring this up because I dropped the ball on a project that was due this past Wednesday. Thankfully the marketing manager I was supposed to do this for wasn’t concerned about the date (in fact, he left me voice mail last night stating he had changes to the web pages he wanted to make), but it still grates that I missed this. I was in the middle of doing “urgent updates” to the website for another department that was launching a product today. Because it didn’t get in the production schedule, I really wasn’t supposed to be doing it. As a result, it’s going to be late, along with a couple of other projects.

I foresee a late night tonight, especially if I’m sitting here writing journal entries rather than cranking out the work.

Ah well…

Sort of like randomness, but on a Friday.

—

No, no design up yet. The creative process is temporarily stalled while I try and clear all the snot out of my head. The snot’s blocking up all the creative passageways in there.

—

My New Year’s Eve was spent with the wife in bed by 8:30, the kids occupied, and me playing online poker. Came in second in a tournament, which is cool. 35K in my bank. Too bad it wasn’t real money.

—

My mom’s Christmas present arrived late this year. She put a $100 bill in the card. I had another sitting $100 bill on my dresser. I put the two of them together in a quiet spot in my sock drawer. I’m hoping with a little mood lighting and some Barry White, they’ll get busy and start sprouting out baby $100 bills.

—

The big news of the week - well, I can’t say just yet. Has to do with work and the rest of the company doesn’t know. I’m 99.99% certain no one here at work reads my journal, but why take the chance? I should be able to say more next week. Until then, cheers.

Yeah, changed the theme again - one of these days I’ll get around to creating my own. In the meantime, I’m sticking with the three-column layout. It’s grown on me.

—

Tonight is opening night for our reading of “A Christmas Carol” - “our” being Sarah and myself. She’s playing the part of Tiny Tim, and is very cute doing it. It’s an interesting adaptation, and I hope I get invited back next year to do the full production.

—

I have a birthday sneaking up on me here, on Sunday to be exact. I’ll be all of 38, which sounds so grown up and mature, but I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so go figure. Speaking of, anyone want to buy me this? No? I’ll settle for this. Hrm, still no takers? Guess this is out then…

—

Had a parent/teacher conference with Cody’s math teacher yesterday. Kid is failing math, not because he doesn’t know the material, and not because he’s not paying attention. It’s because he’s lazy and doesn’t want to do his homework and lies to us about having done it. My past is coming back to haunt me. I did the same damn thing. His teacher even said that when called on, he knows the problem. But because he doesn’t do the homework, he doesn’t do as well as he could on the tests. Turkey.

—

After Christmas, I’m going to go out and buy a new hard drive and install linux on it and start messing with that again. Once I get Gail her iMac, I’ll take over her laptop and install something other than Vista on that. Vista out of my house would be a wonderful thing.

—

Dicewars Cheats.

—

If Slack doesn’t fix his white border problem, I swear to god I’m hacking into his site and fixing it myself.

—

If I don’t see you or post again before Christmas, I want to wish everyone the very best holiday possible. Make it more of family, peace and love than “look what I got!”. Merry Christmas everyone.

I’m looking at the world today and I’m thinking, “Is the world insane? Is everybody just eff-ing crazy?”

It’s kind of unnerving.

So, today is the last day of NaBloPoMo, and having posted every day but one, I figured I’d take a second to reflect on my experience.

Simply put, it was a lot easier than I expected. At the beginning I had suspicions that I would have a difficult time coming up with something new to talk about each day. Part of the challenge is to not only post each day, but to post something meaningful and interesting to at least yourself, if not others. After all, this journal is for me to read. I like having others read about what’s going on, and enjoy it when they react to a post strongly enough to feel the need to leave a comment. But first and foremost I’ve always treated this journal as something I keep for myself (with the exceptions of the random IMs I get - some of those are just too funny not to share). At least half-a-dozen times I’ve gone back to read old posts, reliving the moment.  So the postings had to be important or interesting or meaningful enough for me to want to read again.

Secondly, writing every day is good practice. I found myself thinking of ways to clarify my thoughts and try to get my point across in a more meaningful way. At least more coherently.

And third, I realized that I do enjoy writing. I’ve always enjoyed fiction writing, but just random thoughts in my head can be fun to express as well. I’ve been thinking about a career shift; maybe I’ll become a writer! Oooh, here we go, I’ll hop on my bike, hit the open road, and take pictures and write about places I visit. That cures my wanderlust, my career change lust, and my harley lust, all in one shot.

Hell, throw in a redhead, and I’ve got ALL the bases covered.

I’m having a wonderfully frustrating day. The kind of day where every turn you make you run into a wall, and the most positive thought you can conjure is that at least the half-hour you just spent banging your head on the desk is good exercise.

Because we do online banking, it’s policy here that I cannot see certain types of information. Fair enough. Let me give you an example of how this works; Let’s say we have a form that has some personal information on it. I can create the form, create the display template the bank will see, and a ‘thank you for filling out our form’ page. I can create all three of these, but I can’t view the results of the display template. That’s where the sensitive info might reside. So the normal SOP is to create the form, send it to my boss, she uploads them, fills it out, and then checks to see if the results are as expected. Because some of these forms have lots of different fields that all have to match up, it’s not uncommon for me to miss something. She takes a screen shot, let’s me know the problem, I take a stab at fixing it, send it back to her, she uploads it again…you can see  how this can frustrate a developer who is used to being able to see the results right away with a simple reload of the page. And she has other things going on sometimes, so there are times when it takes half-an-hour, up to three hours to get to it.

Now…take my boss out of the equation (She’s off getting married this week). What do I do? Normally, I’d send them to a second person and he’d take care of it. However, he’s off watching my boss get married.

So now what? I sit, twiddle my thumbs, try to find a way around this silliness. Quite a frustrating day I’m having and it’s not even two…

This is a strange coincidence - I was pondering what to post today, and was half-leaning towards another “Damn, I want to get out on the road and travel in my own self-contained vehicle” type of post. I’d gave blood in the bloodmobile yesterday (Big old schoolbus converted to a rolling stick-a-needle-in-your-arm-and-take-my-blood bus), and while lying there, was thinking of how I would convert that particular bus to suit my needs.

But I felt it was probably too soon after the last post where I talk about wandering, so I decided against it, and posted a quick blurb about Expression Engine. Shortly after, I got into a conversation with a friend about the word ‘hoopty’. As in ‘That’s one hoopty ride’. She didn’t know what it meant, so I told her it was like cool/nifty/bitchin’/righteous… I did a quick google search, and among the many hits, found a blog called “Hoopty Life: One homeless woman’s guide to van dwelling, car living and urban camping.” Now how a homeless  woman has internet access I haven’t discovered yet, but it’s a good read from a first-hand point of view about this particular lifestyle.

Pretty weird coincidence…but I’ll go with it.

At the grocery store this evening, I was standing in line, waiting to make my purchase behind a lady on a cell phone. Some people are decent cell phone talkers, can either carry on a conversation quietly, or tell the person they’ll call back. Not this lady, she was babbling about meeting someone somewhere loudly. And she never stopped talking, even when she was checking out. Quite annoying. I saw her a few minutes later in the parking lot. She loaded her groceries, got in her car, backed out and left and never stopped blabbing into the phone. Seriously, do you need to be *that* connected? It annoys me that some people have to be on their cell phones all the time. I wish the cashier would’ve not helped her until she gave him her attention.

On a side note, signing your name on those card readers is pointless - the signature doesn’t even look close to my real signature. So I’ve recently started just making loops and swirls. Sometimes it’s just a big X - other visits I write stuff like “Shark Attack!”

Great fun.

Yup, I missed a day.

I thought about it as I was going to bed. Yesterday was a typical post-Thanksgiving day; my brother an I hit a couple of stores, Gail and Adriana went hiking with Sarah. Sounds like that should be the other way around, until you realize Seth and I went to Micro Center and REI. Good guy stuff.

But as I was thinking about this, I realized I really didn’t care if I made every single day posting or not. Especially if I’m just posting to make my quota, so to speak. And that’s what I was afraid of when I first started; that I’d make crap posts just to post. So I decided not to. And look! It didn’t kill me!

It was good having Seth and Adriana down for Thanksgiving, and we’ve already made plans for next year. Thanksgiving 2008 we’ll be inviting the rest of the family to come, so that’ll be a bit more challenging. Gail’s never cooked a turkey before (but it turned out splendidly), so Seth and Adriana were just a warm-up.

Today is play practice and laundry. Typical Sunday.