Just now made the interstate. What day is this!
Author: Doug McCaughan
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Bedtime with the Beasts – Travel
The boys are stuck in traffic trying to get to the interstate. East bound looks good.
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In the jungle, the lion sleeps tonight
Tonight I get the pleasure of taking 25 cub scouts to the Zoo to spend the night. Two years ago Cathy took the girlscouts. Noah may be just a little excited; at 8am, he asked, "when are we leaving?" This trip sounds really fun!
Noah actually went with the girlscouts when he was 8 years old but had a 1 hour long nose bleed and was picked up early. Hopefully we won’t repeat that tonight.
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Query of Query Quirkiness
In my recent post regarding Queries of Queries I should have pointed to a site with some information others my find useful.
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Get that man a snail!
So, how do you stay in a fishtank for 8 days without doing something embarassing?
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Why do women have poor depth perception?
My package check post reminds me of a joke I heard on the radio once. The radio personality asks the audience to hold their index finger and thumb about two inches apart. She then asks, "why do women have poor depth perception?" and goes on to say, "because all our lives we’ve been told this is six inches!"
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Package Check
Men love their penises. This cannot be denied. We remain ever vigilant to size, girth, performance, and usage quotas. We give them names, haircuts, dress them in raincoats, and polish them frequently. But when does a man become aware of his penis? I think most men would admit around age 10 but then go on to lie horribly about the history of their penis, its statistics, the number and frequency of polishings, and the date of first use. Like a used car, you cannot trust the odometer nor the salesman!
All parents of male children know that the adult male’s memory does not serve him well. That penis works from birth. Children bring many shocking things into your life but nothing quite prepares you for the morning salut when changing that diaper within the first 6 months. Then suddenly between 9 months and a year, he discovers it! Opening the diaper invites a package check! You have to rapidly clean the area and then give in to letting him make sure all parts are intact.
Nearing 1 year old, Evan not only does his daily package check, he utters a sound that is hard not to mistake for "Mine!" I assure you, he won’t let go it it until he gets married and hands it over to his wife to keep in a jar.
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Lost thoughts
Since I haven’t done my Lost review this week, I’ll post a comment I made on a forum.
I don’t think Walt ever typed anything on the computer. I think it was in Michael’s mind. I think Walt was trying to communicate telepathically and couldn’t get it quite right which is why he was visible to Shannon and Sayid but his speech was backwards. He found it easier to project the typed text into Michael’s mind.
When Jack walked in on Michael after Michael had been talking to Walt on the computer, the screen was blank although Michael did not touch the keyboard and only a second later had been in mid-sentence with Walt.
I think Fake Henry is a strong telepath. Remember Jack saying “you’ve got good ears.” He wasn’t listening through the door. I think when Michael came into the hatch, Henry finally found a mind weak enough to control. Henry, not Michael, shot the drunks, er, I mean examples, er, partiers, er, no, um, ladies…yes, Henry shot the ladies.
I still think that when Henry said to Anna Lucia, “you killed two good people” that he was looking into her mind and referring to incidents off the island.
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I can’t afford my wife
I knew she valuable and, I love her dearly, but this is just out of budget!
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released Wednesday.
Now, conceivably you would think we could save money by having her work outside the home but noooooo!
A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.
Mom’s can go to this website to calculate their pay and get a paycheck printed. I wonder if I can get a $134,121 tax deduction?
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From the mouths of babes
Amy, sugary sweet: "Mommy, it’s not your fault."
Mom: "Thank you Amy."
Amy: "Mommy, it’s not Evan’s fault."
pause
Amy, matter of factly: "It’s Daddy fault." -
Amidst Celebrity!
I have been in the same room as Glen Reynolds and met Michael Silence (multiple times).
Last night to help the children get their minds off Lucy, we met a visiting uncle and the grandparents at our favorite family restaurant, IHOP. Uncle Stinky had purchased Narnia
for the children without knowing they already had it so we all headed to Best Buy for an exchange to Fraggle Rock
Lissa Kay of Oh…really? is wonderfully pleasant. I could have spent the rest of evening chatting with her. Of course there was the trepidation caused by timidity of being amid celebrity. And the hesitation in conversation trying to avoid redundancy.
Me: And then…
Her: Read it.
Me: The cutest thing…
Her: Commented on it.
Me: Did you hear?
Her: Hey! You got that from my blog!Of course, that was the conversation in my head; not the real one! I hope to bump into more bloggers. It is quite a thrill!
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Lucy has passed on
At roughly 11am yesterday, Lucy peacefully drew her last breath. The family grieves her loss as she has been with the children most of their lives. We have never viewed our animals as simply pets; they are family members. Molly, the dog, and Two Paws, the cat, seem sullen. Lucy shared many great times with us. She will be remembered well.
I want to thank everyone for your supportive comments (and here) on the blogs and in person!
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All things come to an end
Our older dog, a golden mix, is wasting. I think she has decided she is at the end of her days. She has not eatten or drank for 3 days. She would not even take a hotdog or hamburger from me tonight.
She is a great dog! I do not want to lose her. I want to take responsibility and blame myself thinking that I could have done better for her somehow. She sits in the yard right now and is refusing to come in yet as I speak to her and pet her she holds her head high and wags her tail like a puppy. I will not force her in quite yet but will check back on her in a bit and give a more forceful encouragement. Perhaps outside is better right now as she is not holding her stomach, bowels or bladder well. All this developed rapidly.
How am I to prepare the children? Will this totally disrupt Tommy‘s final weeks at school? Do we spend money trying to buy Lucy some time or assume she is in pain and put her down? What does Lucy want? There should be more time.
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Project Done!
Most of the time I try to avoid talking about my work. Often it just is not appropriate. However, many people have no idea what I do. I find solutions to computer problems with a focus on web application development and database design; usually my work is in content management, inventory control, and e-commerce/point of sales. I have bid projects on automation of assembly lines, and done work as diverse as writing C++ programs with the aid of Russian programmers (that app had many millions of downloads btw). I sometimes get hands on and build computers or troubleshoot and repair systems. Often, I find some of my solutions to problems both fun and really cool.
I just completed two fun projects that each tormented me with overruns on deadlines due to technical hurdles. The latter was simply a statistical report of some tracked performance on a website. The challenge in organizing and categorizing the data came down to database design choices previously made by the client including housing some of the data in a MS SQL database and some of the data in a MS Access database. A requirement was speed so the choice was made to place as much onus on the MS SQL database for preparing the data. Unfortunately, this came down only to using some aggregate functions to get the totals and unioning a couple of tables. I did have the pleasure of writing a neat little UDF to convert a list into some table results. Because of the way the aggregate functions had to be written, the data came out neither grouped appropriately and with some unavoidably duplicate data.
Fortunately, ColdFusion now has the ability to perform queries on queries including the joining of data across different datasources. So now that I had data appropriately summed albeit out of order and with some duplicates (as stated previously), I could write a query to pull the labels from the MS Access database. All labels and details were in Access; all statistical information, referred to only by id, was in SQL. Next I used a query of query to join the resultset from the stored procedure with the result set from the Access database and now the data started to resemble something meaningful; however, duplicate information still litered the results.
ColdFusion also allows for manually building a result set. I’ve seen the unfortunate growth in popularity of the term "fake query" which is a terrible misnomer. It is a manual query result set. You, the programmer, are programmatically reproducing a set of data that otherwise would have been delivered via a database engine. So, using a loop to step through our latest result set formed from the QoQ and logic within the loop, I create a result set that combines information from the semi-duplicated rows into a single row. In the process I wrote a slick little number using a structure to hold the grand totals for each segment that I could refer to mathmatically when outputing the result set. Then I simply display the results reaching into the structure for additional information when necessary.
Wahla! Greek.