Reality Me

Category: Daily Life

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

  • And today started off so well…Now I’m seeing stars

    I have been working a project that no person in their right mind would have accepted, particularly at the pittance of the budget alloted. It is a train wreck but today, after several hours of feeling like I was trying to fill the ocean with sand from the beach, I felt the train was back on the track! The client is in a timezone 7 hours ahead of me so I have to work furiously to have this done for their opening business day. Then I had a meeting to help the boy scouts plan for a high adventure trip next summer. During the meeting, at 4:30pm on a Sunday, I get a message that another parent has called my wife to consult on the 3-D solar system project that he knows all parents have probably been working so furiously on for the whole weekend (or longer). Solar system project?! To be built to scale! And with excellent report attached.

    So, a pot of coffee brews as I tear the house up looking for objects that are to scale (a trip to AC Moore for Styrofoam would have been nice!) and watch the business day in my client’s timezone come ever so much nearer. Let’s go upstairs and figure out just what the world revolves around.

  • I’m not yelling. I just want them to hear me!

    I thought yelling at them made the homework get done faster. Stop! You’re getting tears on your project!!!

  • Be your own client

    I think all too often we consulting programming types say, "one day I’ll take the time to write something for me." One day never comes.

    Don’t wait for your "ship to come in" and feel angry and cheated when it doesn’t. Get going with something small.
    – Irene Kassorla

    Something small…

  • Veterans Day parade was much fun!

    Multimedia messageEvan, Cathy, Molly and I picked up Granddaddy and the 5 of us when downtown to watch Sarah march with Bearden High School’s band’s flag team in the Veterans Day parade. We parked in the State Street garage for only a dollar and walked 2 blocks to be near the front of the parade route. The aircraft fascinated me. Multimedia messageI loved the helicopters playing overhead. The vintage planes doing the missing man formation was excellent. As a matter of fact, all the military vehicles were awe inspiring. Evan waved at the tank driving down the street and the turret spun around to wave back at him! Those things move quickly!

    Evan was in a foul mood to begin with and getting him to wave took some effort. The nice lady who got near him and showered him with candy helped a lot. After the attack of the "cannie!" he was much chipper and social. About half way through the parade he started to get into the waving.

    Multimedia messageMolly was on great behavior but quivered whenever a noisy vehicle or drum section of a band walked by. She was on alert whenever Evan would wander too far. She has to be able to see him and much prefers to be beside him. Multimedia messageShe was a hit with all the police officers and many of the military. You could see them in the parade pointing to her, smiling and chatting amongst themselves. She eventually relaxed enough that I didn’t even have to hold her leash.

    I was disappointed in the attendance at the parade. More people should take time to let this parade be their lunch break or to bring their families out. The weather was perfect. The patriotism high! Mardi Gras spoiled me for parades and I never thought I would enjoy this kind of parade again. I was wrong. This parade left me feeling very good!

    Btw, Barney Fife was there! He’s great! Don Knots would be proud.

  • Respect the single parents

    I don’t know how single parents like AtomicTumor (or is he?) manage to work and still be such awesome parents. With two of us, sometimes I don’t feel like there is enough parent or energy to meet the demands of the children much less the demands of the children and work! And some mornings there is this game that goes on. Evan wakes and announces himself and I lay in bed waiting for Cathy to get up while she lays in bed waiting for me to get up. I always lose this game; after all, I’m the morning person.

    We should all reach out to the single parents in our lives and offer to care for their children one Friday night so that they can sleep in on a Saturday morning. I bet they’d love that! Don’t get me wrong. Nothing is better than spending time with the children but everyone needs a break to catch their breath every now and then.

  • I stole my wife’s dream

    I woke up having my wife’s dream waking up having my wife’s dream waking up having my wife’s dream. She did this the other night and it is both disturbing and cool. After coding during the wee hours I took a nap and dreamed that I woke up and went back to coding and after a little work I really woke up to realize I had been dreaming about work then I closed my eyes drifting back to sleep to have the same dream. I repeated this cycle about 4 times.

    I feel very sleep deprived.

  • I love this weather!

    It is so crispy and beautiful outside! If I had my druthers, I’d drop everything and go on an all day hike.

  • How consultants really terminate a project

    The software industry is filled with "two more weeks" promises and deadlines. The truth of the matter is that I can always tell a project is nearing the end when the incense starts to run out. I’m down to pine, musk amber (Cathy says smells like dust), and rose. This is almost as bad as running out of coffee!

  • I dream solutions to my problems

    At 3am, I was pounding my head on my keyboard with this bizarre problem. The PHP code I had written was reading the XML data from the XML file but for some inexplicable reason was breaking one of the nodes in half. If it was supposed to read "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" it would instead create two nodes such as "the quick brown" and "fox jumped over the lazy dog". Maddening! So I slept. And in 5 minutes this morning, I solved the problem. I still wish I could take a pill instead of sleeping.

    Update: The correction to the problem was to read the whole file instead of reading it in 4096 chunks.

  • Why dads yell

    Because we don’t get Calgon!

    Relaxing at a friends houseTommyDungeons and DragonsA friendA friendKicked back

    The decibel level in our house exceeds anything considered safe. Last night as we played D&D with some friends, Cathy pondered why our friend‘s house was so quiet compared to ours. We conjectured it is the televisions and computers but I think it comes down to Amy. Sweet Miss AmyShe is so shrill! Then Evan tries to match her. We get multiple conversations going on simultaneously. So while someone is at the table finishing their dinner with the clinking of utensils, we have Cathy typing at her computer to pull up the children’s grades and talking to one of the teenagers about their school performance. I am listening in on their conversation while running water over the dishes and cleaning up counters and talking to another child with some segues to interject on Cathy’s conversation. Meanwhile Evan clomps across the wood floors while screaming like a girl with Amy chasing him and screaming. The adults increase their volume to be heard. The teenagers yell their conversation. The tea kettle blows (no reason).

    Does this sound like your calm evening? We are definitely no like dinnertime with the Cleavers, My Three Sons, or Pleasantville. I think tomorrow I will wear ear plugs.

  • From the mouths of babes

    Evan wakes from nap: "Daaaaa oooeeww Daaa. Da DAAAA. OH Daa DAA!"

  • I sleep for my clients

    In college, I spent a lot of time trying to live on only 3 hours of sleep a night. It was that "sleep is a waste of time thing." After a couple of years, I crashed and slept through a summer break. For the record, you cannot catch up on sleep. If you think you can shave a few hours one night and make them up another night, you are fooling yourself. However, you can make yourself sick.

    Last night I wanted to pull an all nighter for work. I chose to sleep. I might have produced some sloppy work last night in twice the time it will take me to wrap it up this morning. I may deliver a little later than I had hoped today. But my work will be higher quality and I feel healthier. Because I slept. Still wish I could take a pill instead of losing those hours.

  • So that’s what it feels like!

    A blip on the graph

    I’ve been waiting since January 2004 for that! Special thanks to:

    Apologies if I missed anyone. Just let me know in comments or email juggler [at] gmail.com

  • Blogging Abby Ham for hits

    I listen to music on Pandora at the recommendation of a college professor who told me that Pandora and its algorithmic music selection is the rage of his research assistants. Wanting to hang with the cool kids, I checked it out and was impressed. Now thanks to Darren Rowse at Problogger, I also listen to Sky.fm and enjoy the higher quality streaming but am not thrilled with the narrow selection of music choices. Thanks to my brother-in-law’s gift of XM Radio to Cathy I rarely listen to regular radio anymore.

    I like Frank Murphy. He blogs and performs in my improv alma mater, Einstein Simplified. Even before the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra I had the best of intentions of checking out his STAR 102.1FM morning show but as is typical of "best intentions" I haven’t done it yet…until today. Frank drew me in with his mention of Reality Me’s report that Google Street Views is in Knoxville. What did I learn from today’s morning show? It is good! And apparently if you blog about Abby Ham, in particular Abby leaving Knoxville for Cleveland somewhere, you get traffic to your blog!

    Good luck Abby Ham! Be strong!

    Update: By the way, I highly recommend the 10th anniversary 5.5 version of Winamp!

    Update: For Abby Ham fans, Frank Murphy suggests visiting Terry Morrow’s blog and Knoxville Trivia Blog.

  • I love the Fall!

    Wow! It is so beautiful outside right now. The air is crisp. Earlier there was a smell of leaking gas (yes yes…gas is odorless but they add a smell) but it has dissipated and been replaced by that smell of…crisp air! I could really enjoy a camping trip right now. Means I should get to work and clean my plate so that I can take a break.