Reality Me

Year: 2007

  • When the skeltons fall out of the closet

    I have often pondered whether or not my life is in order enough for me to die. If Cathy and I got killed in a car accident today, would I be ashamed to have relatives, friends, and estate movers go through my house. The truth of the matter is there are 2 or 3 things that I should probably give some attention to before I die. One, having pack ratted and kept unnecessary clutter, I should get fly and throw out a bunch of stuff or at least clean and organize.

    Oh my God! How did they live this way?!

    Truthfully, Cathy and I are both working at de-cluttering. A slightly larger house or a couple of room additions to this one would be helpful. So would a storage shed for bikes, outdoor toys and yard equipment.

    Two, I have kept journals, deep dark inner thoughts released to paper to unclutter the mind. These thoughts, some irrational and most situational, simply would not make sense to readers other than myself. I would hate to have someone’s memories of me misconstrued by some misinterpreted readings.

    The boy needed therapy!

    Note to self: find a trusted friend that will sneak in and burn those things after my demise.

    Three, The Drawer of Sex and Violence. Admit it! If you are an adult, you’ve got one too. Shoot. If you are a teenager you probably have one. Granted, it may only contain condoms (or small condoms), a playboy (after all, you’ll go blind!), a flashlight, or something else that helps you ring your bell.

    In late summer several years ago, the county medical examiner was called by the police to view two bodies found in bed in a private home. The home belonged to a 39-year-old caucasian male whose body was one of those found in the bed. The other body was that of a 31-year-old caucasian female. The female body overlaid that of the male. It was obvious that the couple was engaged in sexual relations when they died. [Source]

    I do not mind admitting that I have worked through a few pages of The Sutra. By after reading this, I now understand what people mean by kinky.

    The deaths apparently were related to the use of an elaborate apparatus utilizing electrical current for stimulation. [Source]

    Those poor people! But I guess if you are going to go out…well…no…that’s just not one of the ways I want my body to be discovered.

  • Dear Sarah

    I know you are a flighty teenager with boys on your mind and you know everything. Yes, parents are stupid. It is a miracle that we were able to figure out how to put tab A into slot B and produce a child whose intelligence far exceeds our own. I understand that we, as parents, somehow managed to live a very sheltered life and that in your mere 14 years you have accumulated far more life experiences and wisdom than we could ever hope for ourselves. Of course, we also went straight from our own mothers’ birth canals to adulthood so we in no way can relate to your teenage predilections (look it up). Now, I know it is a condition of our own ignorance that we lay such importance on silly, mundane things like putting clothes in the laundry instead of leaving them on the floor. Being organized helps our simple minds which is why we ride you so to live a clutter free and structured life. Do it for us! I can overlook the laziness of the clothing; however, please be sure to unplug your hair straightener. Being a dumb adult, I might grab the wrong end and burn myself. More importantly, being a toddler, with a decade left before he knows everything, Evan might burn himself. Oh, and since you already know everything and one day will be living on your own, certainly you can appreciate the fire hazard this tool presents. Wuv ya!

  • Procrastinate and Pay

    I knew the forecast. Odds were rain would come last night and I still had the driveway covered with stuff from the garage. Mother Nature had been kind to me and gave sunshine so I could get caught up on work. Throughout the day I would go to the driveway and pull in an item or two. I should have taken 20 minutes and gotten it all in. Last night, Mother Nature watered the remaining stuff. Doesn’t look like anything is damaged terribly. Will let the sun dry things today and throw away anything that took significant damage.

  • Back in Business!

    Last night while I was putting my machines back in place from our temporary exile to Holiday Inn Express (no, I don’t feel smarter), I awkwardly squeezed under my desk with my chest across the case of my primary development machine, one hand on the front corner, and one hand on the back corner when a strong tingling sensation raged through my body. I said a wordy dird. Cathy responded kindly, "Are you ok?" To which I honestly answered, "No, I’m being electrocuted." She suggested, "you should get up." I explained, "I can’t." And she left the room. Leaving me to die…die! DIE!

    And yes, I found the short and have since gotten my development box and servers working. My clients will be happy to know productivity is back!

  • Of Grasshoppers

    Student: What’s that under my butt?!
    Master: I call it fire.

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  • The day thus far

    3am, 4am, 5am
    Bolt upright, check on children, try to convince self to work on computer
    6am
    Admit I will have to work during the day like the rest of the world. Sleep.
    6:40am
    Jump out of bed. Move Amy from one hotel room to another. Rouse oldest 3 children with sunlight and bright lights.
    7am
    Head to lobby for coffee. Receive phone call from Tommy telling me the time, that he can’t get into the other room (because I locked the connecting doors so that the oldest 3 would not wake the youngest 2 or Cathy), and that he and Noah are ready. I explain I am heading to the car and that anyone not there can have the front desk hail them a taxi.
    7:10am
    All 3 older children in parking lot
    7:30am
    Re-fueling van and waiting to watch a motorcycle vibrate itself off the kick stand
    7:35am
    3 eldest children at bus stop
    7:41am
    After getting to the house, inspecting the current state of a/c repair, and staring at all my junk to figure out what needs to be tossed and howt o neatly fit the rest back into the garage, I realize that Noah and I never discussed his afternoon plans with his mother. I make an executive decision, write a note to allow him to ride the bus home with a friend, then rush up to the bus stop 2 minutes later to find that at 7:43am the high schoolers are gone but Noah gets his note.
    7:50am
    Drop Noah’s tent off at his friend’s house
    8am
    Buying anti-migraine caffeine therapy from Starbucks for Cathy (ie. Hot chocolate)
    8:15am
    Back in hotel looking at 3 sleeping people…well, 2 and 1 pretending…to find the door between the rooms open and the other room’s door to the hallway open. I jump to blame Sarah then realize that the pretender must have been exploring. Egad!
    9am
    My professional day begins.

  • From the mouths of babes

    lounging in the pool

    Noah asks: "Can our a/c stay broken forever?"

  • Are you valid?

    OPML for the Top 20

    HTML is hypertext which is nonlinear navigation between related or unrelated documents, ie. links, and markup language with is symbols (in web speak, tags) to indicated to the printer (in web speak, browser) how the content should look and be presented.

    The term markup is derived from the traditional publishing practice of “marking up” a manuscript, that is, adding symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins of a paper manuscript. For centuries, this task was done by specialists known as “markup men” and proofreaders who marked up text to indicate what typeface, style, and size should be applied to each part, and then handed off the manuscript to someone else for the tedious task of typesetting by hand. A familiar example of manual markup symbols still in use is proofreader’s marks, which are a subset of larger vocabularies of handwritten markup symbols. [Source]

    Sidebar

    Many non technical people mistakenly think The Web and The Internet are the same thing. To avoid too much of a digression from the topic of this post, let us distinguish the different by explaining that the Internet is the physical network of wires, radio signals, and computers that are linked together to share information. The Web is documents and other media (like videos and pictures) which are linked together for the ease of collaboration and sharing. For example, by reading this article, you are using the Web over the Internet. By checking email, you are simply using the Internet and it has nothing to do with the World Wide Web.

    As bloggers, we tend to write quickly and proof later (yes I generalize but you will see this post on my first draft). The array of blogging tools out there provide handy little WYSIWYG editors to help rush content out. Personally, I disable WordPress’s wysiwyg. These tools allow us to be sloppy and produce bad code/markup. The W3C is an international member organization with the mission of creating Web standards and guidelines. The W3C does not define the World Wide Web but because Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the Word Wide Web in 1989 while working for CERN, also created the W3C, and so many industry experts are part of the consortium, W3C recommendations are highly regarded.

    The W3C provides tools to validate your markup against the HTML specification. By making sure your website, and a blog is just a website that updates often, has valid HTML you can be assured that page will present its information in most any browser or news reader as you want the person reading it to see it. Non-valid markup can send a browser into quirks mode and the outcome may be unpredictable. Valid markup also lends to more favorable search engine placement. A blogger who takes the time to make sure their site template is valid HTML and that their regular posts are valid HTML making the entire site valid HTML may get higher placement in a search engine than a comparable blogger who does not validate.

    That said, there is an argument that validation for bloggers may not be all that important. According to Bug Leak, all the blogs in Technorati’s Top 20 fail to validate.

    This probably means that complying to the W3C standards is not a priority for the most popular content creators on the planet. [Source]

    The article lists these 20 blogs and the number of validation failures. I was curious to find out what separates these great content creators from RealityMe (of course, I can guess that they have focused topics, thousands of links in, huge readership, more regular posting, etc.) so I added each to my feed reader to gander daily for a bit. I have saved the RSS links as OPML so that anyone can import the same 20 blogs into their readers. Bug Leak points to a great tool for WordPress users called XHTML Validator plugin. This plugin checks the content going into the database (not the actual template) to make sure that your posts are valid. How does one write valid code without knowing what constitutes valid HTML? Simply install the XHTML Validator plugin and begin posting. When it shows you errors, correct them and learn by doing!

  • A nice relaxing Saturday in a hotel

    Sleep in! Play racquetball! Run the treadmill Get food delivered to the room! Turn the a/c up as high as it goes! Ah, what fantasy!

    Reality: Go to a 7am Scout leaders meeting. Rush home and clean the garage for the a/c repairman. Help a friend move. Shop for Tommy’s birthday party. Celebrate Tommy’s birthday. Catch up on two days missed work. Do other personal work, paperwork and financial stuff. Remember to eat. I’ve missed something.

  • Steak tonight!

    Thanks to Les Jones making me aware of the new cut of beef called a flat iron steak, we are trying this supposedly tender piece of meat tonight. I had seen this cut in the store, but prior to his review, had given it a jaded eye considering its lower price. Tonight we shall see!

    Update: They lived up to Les’ report. Tender and tasty!

  • Practicing what I preach

    I have bemoaned that we could get the United States onto the metric system if we started using it. You know.. put up speed limit signs that show both metric and English measurements. Of course if both the metric and English measurement appeared on the same sign, people may continue to ignore the metric. What if the English measurement sign was a half a mile before the metric. Confusion? We don’t confuse a yield sign with a speed limit sign. I think this could be worked out. Make metric the prominent measurement on all things and the English measurement the smaller. Right now my speedometer shows English measurements very large and shows metric speeds in a smaller, darker print.

    What can I do? I am going to commitment myself to using metric as often as possible. I will find a thermostat for the house that displays in centigrade. When I give distances to the Scouts, they will be stated metrically first. And so forth. I know I can do this! I already drink out of two liter bottles.

    Update: What is a meter?

  • Of Being Dad

    Break my heart! Evan needs his afternoon naps! But when I put him into the crib and he protests it makes me cringe. Right now he is sweetly (with increase aggravation) crying out, "Daaaaa Daaaaa DAAAAA!" He wants me, the bad guy that caged him in the first place, to rescue him. You know, if it wasn’t 90°F in this house, he might just go to sleep.

  • When Bloggers Vanish

    So what happened to The Zero Boss?

  • Protect the stores!

    Leave your homes vacant!

    There are more than 30 events planned in Knoxville for a National Night Out against crime. [Source]