Amy: "Dad, why does my bus come so early?"
It is funny that the youngest (school age) person in the house has to be the first up.
Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
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Bizarre FTP problem
One of my clients changed their ftp server to use active mode instead of passive mode. Using SmartFTP, WinSCP, the DOS prompt, and Filezilla all fail to get a directory listing off the server. They each appear to connect but then die. One gives an error message of "Failed to retrieve directory listing" and "An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine." I initially thought Comcast was blocking a necessary port but I can FTP fine to other servers both secure and non-securely.
I can however, connect to the client’s server from one of my shell accounts on a server where I do some hosting. So my work around to this problem is to ftp files to and from the client’s server with the shell and then to and from my local machine with the shell. So the shell account is acting like a middle man. What a pain!
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Where do the utterz players come from?
How can i get i thin player to auto post with the utterz?
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterz.Replies. mp3
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Squirrels in the attic by jj abrams
Squirrels not taking the bait. Moving the trap closer to the nest.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterz.Replies. mp3
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I’m an uncle!
Congratulations to Danny and Lucy on the healthy birth of their baby! It is healthy and I am told he/she/it is not the hermaphrodite I had bet on. Throughout the pregnancy, they artistically kept us guessing as to the gender of the child. I personally guessed it would be born gender neutral ergo I will forever call it Pat. However, apparently it was not born gender neutral and they have given the child a wonderful name derived of family names which implies a particular gender. Good job to all 3 of you!
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Off the wagon..100 cups here I come!
So I decided to detox. I quit coffee. For roughly a week and a half. My mind calmed. My productivity increased. I had a brief period of headaches but that could have had something to do with last week’s dreaded cold.
Tonight I have officially rejoined the land of the living. Pumping some French Roast into my veins right now! Let’s stay up for a few days shall we?
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Too much overhead
Today needs to be a fast and furious day of highly focused coding. First monkey wrench, Knox County Schools are opening 2 hours late. Second monkey wrench, I have a couple of hours of phone calls and paperwork to do. Effectively my day is cut in half which means that I’ll be programming into the wee hours of the night. I wonder if I shouldn’t outsource my life. Tim Ferriss has outsourced everything including dating.
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Dad’s are perfect
Which makes it extra painful when we make mistakes particularly when you can’t seem to back out of the mistake.
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And works goes on!
After too much deliberation and mediating a temper tantrum, the 2nd sales call is done. Now onto productive work!
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The clock ticks
My projects cry out to me like hungry babies but sales calls have to be handled first. One down. One to go.
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Work from home and forced holidays
I am a strong advocate of telecommuting. I think we should rapidly transition our workforce to their houses. The results would be less fuel burned, less infrastructure for companies to maintain, less coal burned, less hydrocarbons released into the air, reduced traffic on the roads, reduced pollution, better relations within families, etc. Many types of jobs such as customer service (over the phone), accounting, technical support, quality assurance, … most office jobs, could be done from the house. Maybe once a week they staff comes into the corporate office for a few hours of face to face. Everything else can be Skype, instant messengers, webex, and other online tools.
All that said, working from home is hard! It is a huge exercise in self-discipline. You have to fight the urge to just lay in bed, or play with kids, or fix that hole in the roof. Finding your work groove can talk a long time. For me, my best performance is when I wake at 4am and get a couple of hours of work done before the kids rise for school. Those hours allow me a few distractions in morning or afternoon without hurting my productivity. My most stressful times are when I have not given myself a buffer for distraction. Fortunately, 4 out of the 5 children are in school so school acts as a natural buffer. School holidays are tough!
When the schools take breaks, the children are wild. A holiday messes with their OCD, their karma, their routine and they get a little charged up. Of course, they also assume that since they are on break, so is the rest of the world which makes it difficult for the work-at-home parent. Of course, when that parent works around the globe and we have a US holiday like Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday and only some of the US celebrates and none of the world recognizes it then the schools tack on an in-service day to make it a 4 day weekend, my stress sky rockets since I feel I’m being torn multiple directions. Many times I have thought about declaring my work scheduled to be the same as the Knox County School’s calendar.
Yesterday was actually a productive day. It did not get quantity checked off my list but killed off a technical hurdle that was driving me nuts. A CSS issue was causing a webpage to render far differently in Internet Explorer 7 than in Firefox. The goal was to have a box of text with a large green border be partially underneath a photograph that had a large yellow border. Naturally the green border underneath the picture should not show. The text could not slide under the picture instead it had to wrap along th edge of the picture. Got it to work for any size photo and any length of text!
All that said, its back to work for me!
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Sick Setback
Being sick last week has totally knocked me out of whack. Schedules have slipped, my head is unclear (clouded with stress and a headache that never left from the sickness), and the room is so blasted cold it is difficult to move. Incense is lit and the music is on. Attempting to focus on a single subject and move forward!
