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Today’s Status Report

Today is far from over but I feel a status report is in order. My wife had important meetings today that would keep her out of the house most of the day and early evening so I’m in charge. She left, two neighborhood children joined our horde, and I attempted to meet my goals. Of course, the older two children were off doing their own things all day so I had no true backup. My goals were simple: write a business proposal in the morning and walk a client through the changes I’d made to their application in the afternoon; if time permits, prospect for more work.

We had no causalities on my watch, but the collateral damage is awesome! Only one dog was so muddy that she needed a bath. Only one child needed a midday bath. We had only 1 temper tantrum and associated bout of tears, otherwise a happy day. There was lots of laughs and much bouncing on the trampoline. I realized that my yard needs to become a much higher priority. I failed to get the proposal done. The chat with the client went well but didn’t end with the "all done" that I’d hoped. I did, however, get some long overdue to do items off my list, such as ordering the dogs’ flea preventative, and that felt great! Now I need to cook dinner and see if I can begin digging our house out of the rubble.

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From the mouths of babes

Looking down at the trampoline I see one child drawn and quartered by four other children. They waddle to the edge of the trampoline and start rocking the captive child back and forth as if to throw her from the trampoline to the ground. Then they release sending the captive nearly to the other side of the trampoline with a flop.

Me, opening the window and softly calling down into the valley: "Hey Noah! Do me a favor and make sure we don’t go to the hospital. I don’t have time for that today."

Earlier it was:

Me: "Evan. We have guests. They don’t want to see your penis."

You know.. there should be a book they give to new parents titled, "these are the ridiculous things you will say" with a list of the absurdities you will utter. I’ve said them all!

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Today is marketing and sales day

As a freelancer, I wear many hats. I am a programmer, quality assurance engineer, project manager, gopher, sexy intern, accounts receivable, accounts payable, technical support, information technologies (IT), customer service, human resources, facilities manager, accountant, marketer, and sales person. I’m sure I forgot a few. Today I am wearing my marketing and sales hats. I have committed myself to getting a proposal out the door by lunch.

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PHP is exactly the same on Linux and Windows…

PHP is exactly the same on Linux and Windows as long as you are using good coding practices, are not using deprecated variables and functions, are not suppressing error messages, are not porting code from an older version of PHP. See, I maintain code on a project that was originally contracted to someone in the United States who failed to tell his client that all he was doing was outsourcing the project to a foreign company. He lost the contract to me when that foreign company became unresponsive to change requests. Many of the comments and variable names are in a foreign language that I do not recognize. The code looks like the foreign company had once written a CMS and just resell it shoehorning new features with hacks. There are many weaknesses to their code but this is not about judging other developers. This post is to warn that although PHP should conceptually move seamlessly from a Linux environment to a Windows Server environment, in reality it doesn’t.

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frustrationfrustraTIONfruSTRAIONFRUSRATION!

I’ve spent the day trying to accomplish something that should have taken 40 minutes and is preventing me from doing the things I really want to be doing today. Something that I’m not even getting paid for. I feel that I’ve been constantly interrupted. At one point I declared, "I’m taking the next 40 minutes and finishing this" during which time I was interrupted 3 times. So finally a crisis hit. Minor. The 7 year old, the 4 year old, and the dog went missing in the creek. Normally this would not be a big deal but we’ve had substantial rain these past couple of days. Also, I believe there is a sinkhole in the creek that the children do not know about. It’s mostly covered with debris right now. It’s not really on my property and I’ve been wanting to clear the debris away to see if it is the entrance to the rumored cave that is supposedly nearby. Right now, I simply know that water flows into the ground through the debris at that point and I don’t want the children near it. So I channeled Coach Boomer (which I only now realized is one of my heroes, Bruce Campbell!) for some echo location and proceeded to be anything except that great TV dad that I so aspire to be. Several tears later, everyone is safe but mad at me. And I feel like crud.

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1994 Was a Long Time Ago – Fix your website!

I need to offer some professional advice to some of you. 1994 was a long time ago. Some things your website should NOT be doing:

  1. do not resize my browser!
  2. do not automatically play music or videos! If you insist on doing this, do not loop the music/video and definitely do give me the ability to stop or pause the obnoxiousness.
  3. do not tell me your website is under construction! Your website should be an ever changing, living, breathing entity. Either hide the elements/pages that are not ready for prime time or put them up as-is and change them when ready. You should have a development server hidden from the public, a staging server which a limited amount of public eyes (testers) can see, and a production server that is live to the world. At the bare minimum you should have a development server and a production server. Never make changes directly on your production server.

Thank you.

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Seeking Recommendations on Netbooks

We find ourselves on the road a bit too much to be as netsavvy and gadget freaky to not be able to have some productivity happening while out and about. I believe a netbook is an economical means to fill that connectivity hole our family stumbles into far too often. Do you have any suggestions, recommendations, or warnings on netbooks, brands and operating systems?

Via Twitter, I’ve learned that Dell solders memory into the netbook making them not easily upgradeable. I now know about http://www.netbookreviews.net/ thanks to xempt who also recommends NewEgg (a favorite shopping spot of mine). Jfloyd pointed out that lspegman has a Hackintosh netbook with a "few glitches but no biggie." steverb says netbooks are 90% the same hardware and gives kudos to Dell’s keyboard design. svandyke likes the ASUS eee (the company we must acknowledge as breaking the barrier for netbooks) and points to C|Net Reviews. ceffyl1 loves her Acer Aspire One D150. jeanroy gave a TweetBrain response (oops. I accidentally closed the question) with good links:

Here are some great links on netbook reviews. http://www.netbookreviews.com/ http://www.netbookreviews.net/ http://www.laptopmag.com/ http://reviews.cnet.com/best-netbooks/ I hope this helps your question. Please follow me on twitter when you get a chance. www.twitter.com/Jeanroy Thanks =D

Asus eee comparison chart.