A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
I don’t wanna but I gotta. Time to wade through the spam.
Why do I hate email?
Gmail: 416 unread; started at 3:16pm; finished 3:24pm
Personal account: 253 unread; started at –interrpted for voicemail and phone calls–
Looking for a wii? At the time of this posting, only eBay has them "in stock"
Monday has held me hostage for the last time! Obviously Monday and I have different agendas. Different goals in life. Different, deeply rooted philosophies. Monday and I simply cannot co-exist. One of us has to change. I have tried to compromise with Monday explaining that Monday would better fit between Friday and Saturday but Monday will hear nothing of it. I tried being compassionate and empathetic and asked Monday what it wanted but all I got in return was a terse, "deal with it like everyone else." I got authoritarian and declared, "this is how it is going to be" only to have Monday laugh in my face and show me that Monday is bigger than me. I tried playing along by starting early and running late but I found out tha Monday does not sleep nor slow down. I can’t beat Monday and we cannot get alone. There is only one thing to do and that is: hate Monday! (and just get as much done as I can and be happy with that…)
My wife is sick today and I feel like I should be working upstairs to help watch Evan and keep him from jumping on her. However, my work today demands that I be on the computer downstairs. I hate this feeling.
Cathy sends text message: "Fighting nausea"
Doug sprints upstairs: "Are you pregnant?!"
This one comes second hand because I was in the store.
Dad: Pulls up to liquor store and goes in. Eggnog sometimes needs rum.
Tommy: "Why are we at a wine store!"
Mom: —I don’t know her reply—
Tommy: "You better keep that stuff downstairs!"
I love taking my daughter to pre-school. She bounces and sings and laughs on the way to school. She sometimes cheers as the building comes into sight. This morning she declared how beautiful her lunch box was. I am glad she likes it. I am glad she is happy. I find her beautiful. Today the teachers commented on her wonderful hair and that they thought it had grown over the Thanksgiving holiday. Indeed, it looks longer. I am prideful when others say how cute Amy is. I love her face.
I feel sad though as I look at her happiness and innocence knowing that our jaded society lurks in the not too distant future waiting to rob her of that joy and turn innocence into scorn. I cannot protect her from the vast negativity, hate and politics that seem to seep into our lives. Even this morning I found myself having to pander to someone’s political play where none was needed; unnecessary tension.
I hope she never loses her smile. I hope remains so happy.
It was a glorious holiday extended weekend. We gave thanks and ate well with family. I worked in a productive workday albeit came across as a crank pot to my wife. We met with The Claus. Celebrated a parting. Put up our Christmas tree and decorations (neglecting the missing outside lights…now where did I put those things?). Completed a difficult and long overdue phase of one of my many home improvement projects. Majorly cleaned a room.
If I had to pick a single moment to highlight, I would pick causing a friend spew his beer and have to excuse himself from the table. What a good weekend!
I haven’t sent any emails…
Please! Stop with the emails! [Source]
And my friend wants to be left alone…
Now go expend your energies where they will do good… [Source]
I still wish I knew what was going on and how I could reach out. I just hope she doesn’t quit blogging or coming to activites around town.
I’m done. [Source]
Update:
I am writing elsewhere though. [Source]
That is good.
Bah! The tree is lit!
I have had difficulty writing this past week. I think the things I want to write about are too personal, too embarrassing or will draw too much criticism. Some people do understand.
"You guys are really happy together. You struggle to make ends meet, but you just love each other so much, you make it through the tough stuff. You’re gonna be fine." [Source]
Of course, AT has shown how to write personally and deeply without concern. I think many of us are asking if we could possibly live up to the tribute that AT created for Barbara Jamie Bearden Kilpatrick (aka GoldenAppleCorp, GAC). The wake was exceptional. I am impressed with how well AT is handling himself. He even caught me off guard last night by asking about and expressing concern for Molly. We can all learn something from AT. Composure. Love. Tribute. How to face adversity. And the fact that I need to go before my wife so that so that I don’t hear "well Doug, that was good and I know you loved Cathy but geez, didn’t you see how AT did it?"
In essense, a client presents a challenge and I solve the problem.
Today’s challenge: a custom ordering system (shopping cart) written in ColdFusion is producing the wrong totals.
The system design: tax is built into the price of the items stored in the database except for certain non-taxable items. A flag indicates if an item has tax built into the price or not. At the bottom of the invoice, the amount of tax charged is shown.
The problem: The system allows for the administrator to apply a discount. Tax cannot be discounted but the total tax shown on the invoice is calculated off the discounted price.
How do you solve this kind of problem? I use my tools available to me. I could just jump into the code and start changing it but I can do a better job and document my efforts by using MS Excel and MS Word to help solve the problem.
Update: I think perhaps the end of this post was lost…
Brakes are done. Parts: $110 ($30 for shoes; $80 for rotors). I could have probably cut that in half. Value in time..probably would have come out better with the $260 at the shop. Satisfaction: priceless.
I never did find the torque settings for the 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan. I ended up using 20 ft/lb for the caliper bolts and 80 ft/lb for the caliper braket bolts. I also learned that Autozone’s lifetime warrantee means lifetime. When the shoes wear out, I was told to take them back to Autozone and get another set for free.
So I am trying to deploy the website I recently completed. Deploy? That means move the site from a development server to a production server where the world can see the application in action. It took this long to deploy because the webhost was running PHP 4.0.0 and had to upgrade to at least PHP 4.4.4 (went to 5.1.6 which is nice). However, they did not take the extra 10 minutes it would have taken to include CURL support.
So, the dev works great using CURL to pull a series of tiffs from another server, then using the Zend Framework, combine those tiffs into a single tiff, and finally convert the tiff to a pdf. I moved the code to the production server and it works fine until we get to converting the tiff to a pdf. It actually converts but the pdf is unviewable simply producing the error "file does not begin with ‘%PDF-‘." These kinds of problems are why developers never make their deadlines. I am working on the presumption that I failed to write some header information into the file. I want this over.
I woke this morning at 1:30. I was ready to sit down and program for hours! But there was that chill in the air. It fought me back under the covers where I succumbed to sleep. At 6:30 the covers were soooo toasty. Ah. You know. I think the bed is more comfortable when you have to get out of it. I would like to take a vacation just to sleep in!
Oh! I need Modafinil! Better living through pharmaceuticals.
