Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
-
From the mouths of babes
Evan, 3.5 years: "I want a cookie."
Dad: "Eat two more bites of meat and I will give you a cookie."
Evan: "Close your eyes and I eat my food." -
I need my batcave!
I love telecommuting! I’m a huge advocate of telecommuting. I think we will find great societal benefit to having a group paradigm shift and having at least half our workforce work from home. Imagine if suddenly companies only needed half (or less) of their existing infrastructure needs. Less electricity spent heating, cooling and lighting them. Fewer monolithic roads needed since fewer people are commuting. Who can telecommute? Accountants, lawyers, sales people, technical people, IT people, customer service, technical support, and so many more. Basically if you work from a desk, all your collaboration can be done online or in weekly onsite meetings. If you have to lay hands on materials like at an assembly line, then unfortunately that is more difficult to do remotely. Barack Obama encourages telecommuting and so does the US Patent Office. Ask your employer to let you work from home to save the environment, make you a happier more productive employee, save the company money, and spend more quality time with the family while simultaneously getting more work hours in for the boss.
Now, the downside! To be a successful telecommuter, you need a batcave; complete with a secret passage. The kids and animals cannot know about your batcave. Nor can the wife! It must be impossible to find. Now where’s my butler?!
-
Handyman of the Day Award – Hot Water
Old busted water heater element replaced with shiny new one. Only two floods in the process, one sliced open hand, and no electrocutions. A 48 gallon tank is too small for a 7 person household but stands a better chance with two working heating elements. (Yes, I cross posted this with Facebook.)
-
Lesson of the evening
A six dollar bottle of wine may not need a cork screw, but after you figure this out it will definitely need a cork.
-
Pet Projects
Every developer needs a pet project. In a decade of writing code for other people I have had some fantastic ideas and even a couple of false starts but never truly had a pet project. My excuse has always been that I was waiting for a lull between projects to be able to write my own but there is no such thing. Either you jump from one project to another or from a project to marketing for another project. I’ve decided that I will steal away 15-30 minutes a day, no more, to work on my own pet project. For the project, I have chosen The Perfect Job. This evening I will take 15-30 minutes and simply decide between custom coding all functionality of the site versus incorporating it into a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Django, or Drupal. As I work through the build out of The Perfect Job, I will blog each 15-30 minute session here.
-
From the mouths of babes
Amy: "Tinker Bell is named Tinker Bell because she’s a Tinker Fairy. Leprechauns are fairies…in Ireland. They make shoes for other fairies."
-
Bureaucracy R.I.P.
An easy mistake as a freelancer is to get behind on paperwork. Maybe that paperwork is balancing your checkbook or sending invoices or mundane like writing up postmortems for projects and filing the supporting documentation or something more evil like IRS filings. Whatever it is, I’m caught up on all of mine!
-
From the mouths of babes
Amy, 6.5 years old: "Dad, what’s a death threat?"
Dad: "What did you just say?!"
Amy: "What’s a death threat? On the show iCarly, they talked about death threats."
Dad: "A death threat means I’m going to have to have a talk with Nickelodeon." -
From the mouths of babes
Evan, 3.5 years old, comes down stairs with his picture in one hand and a Rockband drumstick in the other. He points to the picture with the drumstick and says: "We go here now."
He was pointing to the picture of the Midway Drive-in. I’d say we’ll be there for opening night as soon as drive-in season starts. -
Today
I have so many deliverables due today that I feel like the pregnancy ward on a full moon.
Btw, if you unplug your harddrive to be able to replace a stick of memory, your AMD-K6 2/400 will report "Primary Hard Disk Fail" upon trying to boot and give you a mild heart attack.
-
Things to add to bids
In today’s economic times, people love to talk about pork in budgets, ridiculous bonus programs, or over the top salaries. Some items are just plain necessary! I think from now on, all my quotes for projects will include a line item for coffee, a line item incense, and a line item for iTunes. That may sound frivolous but if you want me at maximum productivity, I’ve got a keyboard in one hand, a cup o’ Joe in the other, headphones emanating tunage into my ears, and lovely scents wafting all about. That said, I’m burning my last stick of incense right now. I may have to make a foray to World Market, Green Earth Emporium, or Earth to Old City today (well..tomorrow).
