Month: July 2007

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Ah the memories!

Not having A/C and relying on fans has taken me back a bit. There is a distinct smell to a house that is not cooled with A/C. There is a definite humidity not felt under the unnatural A/C. The sounds are different in a house closed from the world to contain the conditioned air. It takes me back to the summers I spent at my grandparent’s apartment in Richmond, VA. It reminds me of the times spent in my great grandmother’s in Wilmington, NC. These are not bad memories. And this is not a bad time. I do not want to go an extended length of time without A/C but living without A/C is not all that terrible.

Alright, to do list:

  • check to see if the unit is under warranty
  • see if home owner’s insurance will cover the repair
  • see what KUB‘s financing plan looks like

I have also learned that no one trusts any hvac repair person in Knoxville and that everyone has the guy to call. Yes, that’s right..it’s a contradiction…

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Hug me

Evan woke up on the needy side today. I live for these moments. He leaned against me and rested those tiny arms lovingly and securely on my shoulders then laid his head against my neck and shoulder. He wouldn’t let me put him down for about 20 minutes. No urgency. No matter how desperate our situation. No matter what deadline. Nothing could interfere with our moment! This is being a dad!

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Stoopid American

My wife finally pointed out to me that for days I have been reporting that our house is maintaining a temperature of 85°C…C as in Celsius. To you Americans, if it was really 85°C then the house would be 185°F…F as in Fahrenheit. To put things in perspective, we all know that water freezes at 32 degrees because that’s when it snows. What we don’t know is if that is 32 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. I’ll clear that up for you right now. It’s Fahrenheit. And before you get your panties in a wad, we we all know that Fahrenheit means Michael Moore which means that if you get frost bite in freezing weather that you won’t be getting proper medical care unless you mortgage your skyscraper but really the only way to collect that money is to take out an extensive insurance policy on the buildings, help rig an election, then conspire with the president to help an incompetent wanna be terrorist, armed with guns he got in high school, blow up the buildings so that the president can settle daddy’s family feud then invade Iran. And that brings us to boiling which we all know is 100 degrees for water. What we don’t know is if that is 100 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Well obviously if we are measuring freezing in Fahrenheit then water must boil in Fahrenheit! And we all know that before Michael Moore, Fahrenheit meant Ray Bradbury (why yes, he is still alive! Just like this guy!) which means we would be measuring the temperature of the water on Mars and since all suspected water on Mars (that red hot planet) is frozen then water on Mars must be 32°F and to measure its boiling point we would have to bring it back to Earth. Re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere is hot, hot, hot and quickly superheats the Martian water to 212°F which boils the water. Since 100° has become available, we will give it up to Celsius so that Celsius can boil water too. On an aside, paper cannot burn in water therefore the flash point of paper has to be greater than the boiling point of water. The flash point of paper just happens to be 451°F; paper cannot burn in Celsius. And concrete melts at 911°F.

So, in summary, water freezes at 32° or 0° whichever comes first and whichever has the greatest likelihood of canceling school. Water boils at 100° and geeky Trivial Pursuits freaks also know that 212° means something. 451° is how hot we got when forced to read a book at a time we were too young to understand the political implications and too distracted by the 451° cheerleader that we could only daydream about nailing. Celsius? Fahrenheit? Doesn’t matter because I know what I mean and you can bet the jock that got the cheerleader sure as Hell didn’t know the difference either! (btw, temperature in Hell is measured in kelvin)

See also.

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Help the cause!

Please drop by our blogathon site and have a look. I would certainly encourage you to sponsor us and I believe you can do that for 48 hours after the 9am end of blogathon 2007 comes in an hour and a half. Any amount of commitment is welcomed and helpful. If you do not want to donate money, donate a second of time to leave some comments on the posts. The comments are greatly appreciated. There are other ways to help STAR including checking out their wish list. Thank you!

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Blogfest and Blogathon

Devil of a wife

Tonight is a Blogfest! We will be there. Rich, one of our Blogathon partners is already at Bailey’s on his shift.

Bailey’s holds a special place for Cathy and I because that was where we had our first date. We met for all of 2 minutes at a Halloween party being thrown at my house then 4 months later we were behaving like nervous school kids on a first date over a pool table at Bailey’s. I rapid fired every joke, with increasing naughtiness, I knew to cover my nervousness. Cathy flirted and wow’d me seducing me with her beauty and wit then upping the ante on my innuendos until everyone in the bar had quit playing pool to watch us being suggestive with pool cues, lessons, and across the table exposures. We had a blast! And our friends who got us together to commiserate our similar situations, hoping that we would take some frustrations out on each other and move on, just sat back and enjoyed the show as two grown adults fumbled around trying to remember how to date.

I almost blew our relationship. I was so overcome by Cathy that I really did not want to screw things up by coming on to hard. So in the parking lot I tried to be all casual and attempted to say, "I don’t want you to feel pressured or rushed into a relationship" but the words came out something like "if you want to get together and have sex without a commitment, I’m your man!" Oh yeah! Smoooooth.

Heading to Bailey’s! Oh! You can still sponsor us! Pleeaasse! Read more here.

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Blogathon Starts in 1.5 hours

Blogathon 2007 starts in an hour and a half and if the AC isn’t doing a better job, I might just have to follow-thru on Cathy’s naked blogging threat just for comfort! It is not too late to sponsor our cause. We will be blogging at least every half hour for the next 24 hours (plus 1.5) at our group blogathon site. Please come comment and cheer us on.

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We are going to war!

The squirrels have been sent in!

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country’s borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. [Source]

I can’t get the squirrels out of my attic. How do you capture trained spying squirrels?! Perhaps Boris and Natasha were on contract! "We’v ‘ave Moose on our side now as doolble agent." Thank you Ray Kurzweil!

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What kind programs do you write?

I often get asked, "Now, what do you do?" and when I try to explain it I get these blank stares and gapping mouths to which I pause then say, "I make web pages." Their eyes light, heads nod, and they declare, "OOooh!" Quickly followed by a subject change.

What do I really do? Right now I am writing an application that allows service providers to advertise their services. So someone seeking a service goes to the website and enters what they are looking for and the matching providers pop up. Sounds simple enough right? Well, if I do my job correctly it will appear amazingly simple to the end user. The behind the scenes programming complexity is awe inspiring. As a minor example, the administrator has to take requests from service providers to be apart of the website. Then the administrator has to create the service provider profile which implies an administrative website that only the staff can access (roles based security). A profile! That’s simple right? Just a database table with all the descriptions of the provider and services offered right? Not really. In actuality it is a very complex system of related lookup tables. Since I cannot predict all the variants of services and pieces of services that may be offered, the system was built to allow the administrator to dynamically add and remove qualities from the service profile. Certainly a detailed specification could have made that simpler but would have resulted in a limited application where as this one can grow to meet the future needs of the client (I know..the simpler approach would have produced more billable hours in the future..blah blah).

Of course, the service provider has to have their own website to be able to manage the details of their service without having to labor the administrator. However, the client does not want the service provider to be able to make certain changes to the profile without approval. So I have had to create a change request table in the database to accept pending changes from the service providers to be accepted or rejected by the administrator. Now there’s a level of complexity that echoes changes throughout the site!

I love my work!

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GW Needs to See Sicko

Democratic lawmakers in Washington say they’re drafting a health care reform bill that would expand coverage for low-income kids. President Bush says he’ll veto any such legislation, warning that it would lead the nation "down the path to government-run health care for every American."
…
What’s particularly galling about Bush’s position is that it’s coming from a man who just underwent a colonoscopy performed at the taxpayer-funded, state-of-the-art medical facility at Camp David by an elite team of doctors from the taxpayer-funded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
[Source]

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Tech Issue of the Day

Today’s terribly frustrating error causing a long delay in a short process is:

Parameter index out of range (1 > number of parameters, which is 0).

It is the result of this simple insert:

<cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
    INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable {
       fooASInt,
       barAsInt
    } VALUES {
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
       104
    }
</cfquery>

UPDATE: Whoops. I see the typo! There is a big difference between {} and (). Should have been:

<cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
    INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable (
       fooASInt,
       barAsInt
    ) VALUES (
       <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
       104
    )
</cfquery>