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You can’t watch them all the time

I caught the seven year old giving the four year old a wedgie. This is one of those moments I feel for single parents because I could not respond rationally and had to tag myself out calling in the second parent. With Cathy’s help we try to convey that this breaks the "no touching between belly button and knees" rule. The question of concern is not why would you do this? but who did this to you? because obviously she learned it from someone. In my head I jump to the worst case scenarios and am horrified. I run down her list of friends and think of the opportunities where inappropriate play could be happening. We probe without making accusations. Amy relents and claims she didn’t learn it from anyone. Then why would she do it? This morning while watching the cartoon network with Amy and Evan, I have an epiphany; She learned it from television.

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Still Recovering

Yesterday was calm, relaxing and very stress free. I slept deep with vivid dreams and slept late. My body still feels the recent abuse. My muscles in my arms ache. My mind feels recovered but I know that toward the end of this week the stress will grow because for the first time in a long time my project schedule is empty. This is one of the conundrums of working by yourself; you must be doing sales and the work at the same time. I strive to keep myself booked out two months at a time. Perhaps some greater force is telling me to take a few days off.

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Today is Postmorem Day

Yesterday a major project ended for me. This project, as most, consumed my life. I gave up sleeping, found myself wearing the same clothes days in a row because I didn’t know the day had changed, skipped meals, and pretty much neglected anything that wasn’t related to getting the job done. Today I examine the aftermath. Yes, I thought I’d take the day away from the computer but if you stop the momentum, the project never really closes.

When I was a quality assurance engineer so many eons ago, I pushed hard for postmortems. In the software world, a postmortem is an examination after the project to review the development process while fresh in mind with the goal of improving the process on upcoming projects. A postmortem doesn’t just discuss where things went wrong but where things went right. A postmortem can include the ever important cleanup that happens afterward such as backing up the development environment, closing out your notes, jotting down notes about assumptions that were made and things aside for the future, and anything else to bring full closure to a project. In the real world, not many people like postmortems. They represent overheard to management and extra work to the developer. And it may or may not be billable to the client. People want to simply celebrate the product delivery, shove everything on the desk to the floor, and move onto the next project.

My postmortem is not billable to the client. Examining the aftermath, I recognize the importance of wrapping up to be able to move on. I can’t even find the surface of my desk right now for the scattered notes and neglected pile of mail. Instead of taking a break today, I’m going to bring closure to my project. (and find my desk).

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So what am I doing at 2:30am?

I turn to my Windows98 machine running an ancient version of Photoshop. In a flattened image, I select a small region and copy its contents. I open a new image automatically sized to the selected region. I paste the copy into the new window and immediately copy the layer and hide the background layer. This gives me the ability to have transparency in the image. I outline the parts I want to keep then create a new layer. In that layer I fill the selection with red and reduce the opacity to 50%. Next I invert the selection and go back to the layer with my image. I delete the extraneous graphics and save the photoshop file. Then I save a gif with transparency optimized for the web. I go back to the source image and note the x, y coordinates of the upper left corner of the selection. I spin to my Linux box with MySQL Query Browser open and I update the database with the x, y coordinates and the new image name.

I’m repeating this process for roughly 160 images. I should be using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for this.

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Working a deadline

What’s the latest in Doug’s world? One, I can’t seem to post to Reality Me with Firefox anymore so I’m becoming a fan of Google’s Chrome browser. Two, I’m on an incredibly important deadline so I’m neglecting everything short of breathing right now. I’ll sleep through Sunday and be back on Monday.

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The day thus far

At 5am, I pointed out the time to a child brushing his teeth in the bathroom. He was quiet in the at a construction site kind of way and the two of us agreed he needed to get a little more sleep before the entire house wakes up. I proceed to finish troubleshooting a client’s website that inexplicably wasn’t updating the database after being moved from Linux hosting to Windows hosting. After some fiddling, the problem was solved before breakfast. The teenager had one of those learning by doing moments, "uh, Dad. What do you do if you accidentally slept with a contact in and now it won’t come out?" Two hours later and a whole bottle of saline, I receive a text message that the contact has come out. I don’t think she’ll be sleeping with a contact in anymore. We still have a friend with a child with 104° fever. Despite all the other kids in the troop getting the confirmation of Type A flu "more than likely h1n1 swine flu but we don’t test for it and the cdc isn’t interested in it anymore and the health department doesn’t want to hear about it" this child’s pediatrician says its something else. The pede is wrong! The mother and the daughter remain quarantined staying at the grandparent’s last night. The daughter returned to our house this morning. She and Amy were the only children here for several days. Now that the other children are home, it’ll be interesting to see how everyone gets along. The dynamic is certainly different and Evan is doing his best to be the stereotypical annoying little brother. I’ve retreated to my dungeon and will now hide in my headphones and frantically try to get points plotted on a graphic today so that I can do some neato stuff for an application that must shine shine shine this Saturday.

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Coding Through the Night

I’ve typed so much in the past 24 hours that my fingers swelled so badly my wedding ring became painful and wouldn’t come off. After risking frostbite in the ice tray of the freezer, my ring was freed. I took a nap from 2am-2:55am, brewed some coffee and took in some smoky, crisp, refreshing fresh air by the hot coals of our fire which has been burning since Saturday. I love a good fire! We could probably cook on this one the rest of the week. If you are in Knoxville and aren’t opening your windows at night this week you are missing a wonderful opportunity. The air outside right now is incredible! Back to bits and bytes, ajax and database transactions.

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Swine Flu May Be In The House

We have a child in quarantine. Several scouts in our troop have come down with Type A flu. Type A flu is not necessarily H1N1 but likely to be. More details after I finish my programming. This has caused great soap opera quality drama. Cathy will likely post information before me at either Domestic Psychology or on Twitter here.