Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

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Thursday’s Schedule

Thursday’s schedule is fairly consistent.
4:30am – wake up and work until 6:15
6:15am – wake up Amy, the 7 year old and turn on everyone else’s lights except Evan, the 4 year old’s
6:15am-6:55am – avoid the computer and focus on getting Amy ready for school. This includes feeding, prompting her to get dressed, making sure that Sarah or Cathy fixes Amy’s hair (I’m forbidden), and making a lunch.
6:55am – Drive Amy to the bus stop (includes some adult social time with 2 other dads..a morning pleasure)
7:15am – Return to the house and prod the teenagers to make sure the 16 year old and 13 year old are ready to go to their respective schools. Distribute checks in response to last minute, "Oh yeah! By the way, I need…"s
7:15am-8:15am – Work which may consist of emails and the bureaucratic side of my job
7:25am – Make sure Noah, the 13 year old has actually left the building
7:30am – Remind Sarah, the 16 year old not to make her ride to school wait on her
8:15am-8:40am – Get Evan, the 4 year old fed, dressed, and ready for school. This includes making a lunch.
8:40am (this could be as late as 9am) – Drive Evan to his pre-school which starts at 9am.
9:30am – Arrive back at home for programming. Sometimes Thursdays might be client meetings or sales meetings. Cathy does the afternoon pickups and child related errands.

So if the 4 year old is supposed to sleep until 8 or 8:15, why is he playing a video game with his 13 year old brother at 7:15?! And yes, I did wake at 4:30 but after walking the dog I returned to bed until 6:15 today.

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Overwhelmed by broken things

These past few weeks have not been good from the hardware side of things. My phone is on its way out but Sarah’s phone died an odd death. She jumps to the front of the new phone line which I think puts her on her 2nd upgrade before Cathy or I have had a single upgrade. My new 500 GB hard drive lasted one day and I’m so torn up over it I’m ignoring it so when I finally get around to looking at it (today) I fully expect NewEgg to give me a hard way to go on issuing a refund. I will never buy a hard drive that isn’t Seagate again! The van battery died without warning. Something is wrong with the hvac. The list goes on.

Today I turn the tide! I’m stepping into my phone booth and mild mannered lethargic depression man is going to turn into super manic Mr. Fix-it! Maybe I’ll even make some vidcasts.

Update: drive appears to work in a different computer. That leaves the problem as an ide controller or cable problem on the primary machine.

Update: Problem resolved. The ide cable had accidentally been pulled loose when I was fooling around inside the case. Oops.

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Browser Testing

Yea there was Gopher and it was good.
Lo and behold, Mosaic!
And it was slow.
Veronica, Gopher, and I were the hare to the Mosaic tortoise.
But Mosaic was pretty.
And Netscape Navigator became standard.
Microsoft saw Mosaic was good and, like Netscape, based Internet Explorer upon Mosaic’s code.
But Microsoft was evil and the world loved Netscape.
Programmers knew code must work in Netscape and then maybe in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 for W3C standards were good, and CSS was good, as long as Microsoft could have some of their own proprietary "standards."
Still Netscape dominated.
Enter Internet Explorer 4 and Browser War I was lost.
Now we tested for first for IE3, IE4, and then Netscape Navigator.
Internet Explorer 5 – meh.
Quirks mode – blah.
WML? No one will ever browse with their phone. WAP!
Internet Explorer 6 – WTH!
Opera.
Mosaic beget Navigator beget Mozilla.
And geeks professed the end of Microsoft while normal people replied, "Firewhat?"
Internet Explorer 7 -FTW.
Now we tested for Internet Explorer at least version 7 and 6, Mozilla/Firefox, and maybe Navigator.
Oh, don’t forget to test with JavaScript enabled and disabled, delete your cookies, clear your cache but be ready to explain this to your end users, and don’t forget the magic reboot.
Internet Explorer 8 – is great?
Be sure to include conditional code for a special IE6 cascading style sheet.
What is Flock?
What is compatibility mode?
All hail Google’s Chrome!
What do you mean? Regular people use Macintosh computers!
Apple has a browser? Safari!
Browser War II.
The website looks different on your phone than your computer?
When you say your Internet enabled toaster prints the New York Times fine but my blog burns your toast, is all the bread blackened or just the crust?
And my website does not control the spooling on your Internet enabled toilet paper dispenser.
And if the ink is smearing on your butt, that just means you are wiping before reading the paper.

What is browser compatibility? Testing against this list.

Today I have a website that looks good in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8. I have not been able to test it in Internet Explorer 7 but will be fixing that today. However, if I put Internet Explorer 8 into "compatibility view," my horizontal list based css driven navigation menu breaks. IE8 Compatibility Mode and IE7 are NOT the same thing! There are many differences between IE8 compatibility view and IE7. So today I’m playing with Internet Explorer’s Virtual Compatibility images.

Interesting, this browser history appeared in my feed today after I posted this.

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Killer Stress

Stress will make my life shorter.

I woke this morning feeling hung over but I didn’t have anything to drink. For that matter, I had a decent amount of sleep, slept like a rock, and had ultra vivid dreams. I know getting a handle on my stress is essential. The side effects of stress that I’m experiencing are increased absentmindedness, memory loss (rather recall issues..I believe the memories are there but the ability to draw them out is hindered by stress), sore muscles, headache, blurred vision, and exhaustion.

I want to live a long stress-free life. Time to get back to Quad II.

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Sometimes I hate computers

I spent some of this weekend making the final transition back to my desktop so that I could give Tommy full custody of his laptop back. Of course, before I gave it back, one of the dogs knocked the laptop off my desk breaking one of the keys. Fortunately there was no other damage. Saturday Sarah’s Palm Centro died. Unfortunately it is out of warranty and after 2 hours on the phone, AT&T declared it a hardware issue. My phone has turned flaky as all get out randomly turning itself off even in the middle of a phone call. Then the icing on the cake, this morning my desktop computer quit recognizing the new hard drive. I wonder if Denso is hiring. I think I could handle a union, an assembly and a repetitive task.

Update: Just to keep the day interesting, we brought a plant in from the porch in anticipation of tonight’s cold weather, placed the plant in the bathroom, Cathy got into the bath, then the yellow jackets started emerging from the plant’s soil.

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My workstation is almost working

After fighting with trying to clone my old 60 GB hard drive to my new 500 GB hard drive, I finally gave in and started from scratch. Since I was installing from Windows XP sp1 I was limited to 137 GB partition. Once Windows XP installed successfully I upgrade to sp 2 then sp 3 and installed all security patches and updates. Then I began reinstalling software beginning with Avast antivirus first quickly followed by iTunes.

Everything seemed to be going very well until I decided to actually switch back to working on the machine. I tried to remap my development servers but cannot browse my network. I get the error message:

WORKGROUP is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

This list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

Guess I’m network troubleshooting this weekend.

Update: I made an important discovery today. None of the computers in the house see each other anymore. I used to be able to open Windows explorer and browse to My Network Places then to Entire Network then to Microsoft Windows Network then to MSHome (the workgroup) then to a specific machine that was visible on the network. However at the workgroup level the error message above occurs. I thought it was specific to this Windows XP machine but I reproduced it on another Windows XP machine. Then I tried browsing the network with Windows Vista and also could not see any of the LAN. So on my newly installed Windows XP machine, I tested pinging various machines on the network with success. So in Windows Explorer I typed a machine name and a known shared directory "\\mickey\www" and successfully browsed the remote directory. I then successfully mapped the drive. On my Ubuntu Linux 8.04 workstation, I clicked Places then Network Servers then Windows Network and get the message "Unable to mount location – failed to retrieve share list from server" which in the past would have simply listed all the devices on the local area network.

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Of Being Dad – TP

The center of the Toilet Paper roll is filled with Tooth Paste. I should mention that between basic needs, the fun of simply spinning it off the roll, making mummies, and doubling as dog chew toys, we use a bunch of toilet paper. Second to food, toilet paper is given the highest priority in this house. Rethining that, I might allow us to run out of food before I would ever dare to run out of toilet paper. To have the toilet paper roll flopping around on the holder like a flat tire on a car and simultaneously smelling bubble gum (flavor tooth paste like bubble gum and children brush more) was a little unexpected first thing in the morning. This is the joy of parenting and, no, tooth paste in the toilet paper was not in the manual.