Month: November 2007

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Respect the single parents

I don’t know how single parents like AtomicTumor (or is he?) manage to work and still be such awesome parents. With two of us, sometimes I don’t feel like there is enough parent or energy to meet the demands of the children much less the demands of the children and work! And some mornings there is this game that goes on. Evan wakes and announces himself and I lay in bed waiting for Cathy to get up while she lays in bed waiting for me to get up. I always lose this game; after all, I’m the morning person.

We should all reach out to the single parents in our lives and offer to care for their children one Friday night so that they can sleep in on a Saturday morning. I bet they’d love that! Don’t get me wrong. Nothing is better than spending time with the children but everyone needs a break to catch their breath every now and then.

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I stole my wife’s dream

I woke up having my wife’s dream waking up having my wife’s dream waking up having my wife’s dream. She did this the other night and it is both disturbing and cool. After coding during the wee hours I took a nap and dreamed that I woke up and went back to coding and after a little work I really woke up to realize I had been dreaming about work then I closed my eyes drifting back to sleep to have the same dream. I repeated this cycle about 4 times.

I feel very sleep deprived.

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Schools want emotionless zombies

First we ban tag because playing tag causes physical and emotional injury and now we are giving girls detention for hugging because it violates the school policy banning public displays of affection!

Megan’s mother, Melissa Coulter, said the embraces weren’t even real hugs — just an arm around the shoulder and slight squeeze.
…
District Superintendent Sam McGowen said that he thinks the penalty is fair…
[The student handbook] states: "Displays of affection should not occur on the school campus at any time. It is in poor taste, reflects poor judgment, and brings discredit to the school and to the persons involved."
[Source, MSNBC

What kind of poor, scarred adult wrote that handbook?! I want my children to hug! I want them to hug their friends. I want the elementary school teachers to hug my children when they fall down on the playground. Touch is important for emotional development.

An example of this can be seen in early childhood development of infants who respond and attach themselves to the adults who love and are responsible for them. In the magazine American Baby it states, “What’s usually the fastest way to soothe a crying baby? Snuggle together while gently stroking him. Your touch has an amazing power to communicate love” (Wu, 2004). [Source, Debbie Cluff, Emotional Development and the Self Esteem in Children]

Touch is one of the five love languages. We need to encourage touch for healthy people and a healthy society! We need to move beyond the sensationalism we hear and read in the news and quit assuming every adult is out to assault our children. Hug frequently!

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I dream solutions to my problems

At 3am, I was pounding my head on my keyboard with this bizarre problem. The PHP code I had written was reading the XML data from the XML file but for some inexplicable reason was breaking one of the nodes in half. If it was supposed to read "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" it would instead create two nodes such as "the quick brown" and "fox jumped over the lazy dog". Maddening! So I slept. And in 5 minutes this morning, I solved the problem. I still wish I could take a pill instead of sleeping.

Update: The correction to the problem was to read the whole file instead of reading it in 4096 chunks.

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Its all about contests now!

So, what happens when a blogger wins a prize? He becomes addicted and let’s his posts become links to other people’s Personal Blogs in hopes he can win a iPod Video Nano. Browie was inspired by Darren Rowse’s Problogger giveaway. Apparently he won a cash prize and much like contestblogger, he is passing the good fortune onto us. This is not a paid post but does gain me an additional 2 entries into his contest. Cathy sure could use an iPod!

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Why dads yell

Because we don’t get Calgon!

Relaxing at a friends houseTommyDungeons and DragonsA friendA friendKicked back

The decibel level in our house exceeds anything considered safe. Last night as we played D&D with some friends, Cathy pondered why our friend‘s house was so quiet compared to ours. We conjectured it is the televisions and computers but I think it comes down to Amy. Sweet Miss AmyShe is so shrill! Then Evan tries to match her. We get multiple conversations going on simultaneously. So while someone is at the table finishing their dinner with the clinking of utensils, we have Cathy typing at her computer to pull up the children’s grades and talking to one of the teenagers about their school performance. I am listening in on their conversation while running water over the dishes and cleaning up counters and talking to another child with some segues to interject on Cathy’s conversation. Meanwhile Evan clomps across the wood floors while screaming like a girl with Amy chasing him and screaming. The adults increase their volume to be heard. The teenagers yell their conversation. The tea kettle blows (no reason).

Does this sound like your calm evening? We are definitely no like dinnertime with the Cleavers, My Three Sons, or Pleasantville. I think tomorrow I will wear ear plugs.

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I sleep for my clients

In college, I spent a lot of time trying to live on only 3 hours of sleep a night. It was that "sleep is a waste of time thing." After a couple of years, I crashed and slept through a summer break. For the record, you cannot catch up on sleep. If you think you can shave a few hours one night and make them up another night, you are fooling yourself. However, you can make yourself sick.

Last night I wanted to pull an all nighter for work. I chose to sleep. I might have produced some sloppy work last night in twice the time it will take me to wrap it up this morning. I may deliver a little later than I had hoped today. But my work will be higher quality and I feel healthier. Because I slept. Still wish I could take a pill instead of losing those hours.