Student: What I want to do and need to do are not the same.
Master: Split your attention between each and accomplish neither.
FW: Today's roomba dissection
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And I thank you!
Thanksgiving Holiday
In the United States, today is a day of thanks. I believe most Americans probably do not know the roots of Thanksgiving. Wikipedia is very thorough discussing United States Thanksgiving as well as Thanksgiving in Canada, Grenada, and the Netherlands. See also History News Network’s The Truth About Thanksgiving Is that the Debunkers Are Wrong and Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving. Note: I have not fact checked the History News Network links. From Encyclopedia Britannica Online:
[An] annual national holiday in the United States and Canada celebrating the harvest and other blessings of the past year. Americans generally believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indians. The American holiday is particularly rich in legend and symbolism.
Plymouth’s Thanksgiving began with a few colonists going out "fowling," possibly for turkeys but more probably for the easier prey of geese and ducks, since they "in one day killed as much as…served the company almost a week." Next, 90 or so Wampanoag made a surprise appearance at the settlement’s gate, doubtlessly unnerving the 50 or so colonists. Nevertheless, over the next few days the two groups socialized without incident. The Wampanoag contributed venison to the feast, which included the fowl and probably fish, eels, shellfish, stews, vegetables, and beer. Since Plymouth had few buildings and manufactured goods, most people ate outside while sitting on the ground or on barrels with plates on their laps. The men fired guns, ran races, and drank liquor, struggling to speak in broken English and Wampanoag. This was a rather disorderly affair, but it sealed a treaty between the two groups that lasted until King Philip’s War (1675–76), in which hundreds of colonists and thousands of Indians lost their lives.
[Source, Encyclopedia Britannic Online, History & Society::Thanksgiving]
I am thankful!
I am thankful for my wonderful family, the joy they bring, the laughter they elicit, the challenges they give me to grow, and their support for my non-traditional career choice. I am thankful for having great clients, some who have gone out of their way to keep me in work, during these economically trying times. I am thankful for all my wonderful friends in real life and online. I am thankful for having met Jason Jarrett on Seesmic and whose podcasts, along with his wife, Karen, have really helped me move closer to sustained happiness and away from the Five Poisons (greed, anger, ignorance, arrogance, and doubt). I am particularly thankful for my wonderful wife who has supported my insanity when she would have been justified to turn tail and run screaming, who can make me laugh with just a look, who makes my heart flutter just thinking about her, and who has pushed me to be a better person than I ever thought possible. I could type the rest of the day simply about the thanks I could attribute to Cathy alone not to mention the numerous people and things I have yet to mention. So thank you all! And I give thanks for this wonderful life of mine along with all its challenges.
For laughs
Don’t forget today is the day to watch the WKRP Turkeys Away video.
Of Grasshoppers
Student: This is not the path I thought I was walking.
Master: Do you have a map?
And they’re off!
The children only had a 2 day week of school. They are off for the next 5 days for Thanksgiving break. This is that holiday where we celebrate invading a foreign land only to survive the winter by the kindness of the indigenous people in return we trade them worthless trinkets for their land, kill them off with disease and pestilence, then lock them in casinos. We celebrate it by eating the bird that Benjamin Franklin wanted to be declared the symbol of this nation when in fact the pilgrims probably dined on lobster.
If you want to jump to the WKRP Turkeys Away aka WKRP Turkey Drop video, start the video below and skip ¾ of the way through to 16:30 and watch until 23:30.
As God as my witness..I thought turkeys could fly.
Wibiya Toolbar Not Showing on WordPress Blog
If you are trying to use the Wibiya Toolbar on your WordPress blog, but it will not appear, try editing the Wibiya plugin and changing the code from:
add_action(‘get_footer’, ‘filter_footer’);
to:
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘filter_footer’);
One foot in front of the other
Today is not going to go as originally planned. Instead it will be quite mad. But I will get through it one step at a time.
Today’s Mental Forecast
Cloudiness with a chance of afternoon breakdowns as a depression rolls in from the southwest.
I have phone again – sorta
My replacement phone for my antique Motorola v3xx RAZR arrived today. Now I have an LG CF360 which looks and acts a whole lot like a Samsung A777. I lost everything! Every contact. Every picture. Every voice recording. Every shortcut in my life. Gone! My contacts in my phone had notes related to the contact, birthdays, private numbers, people I only talk to once in a blue moon and do so because I see (saw) them in my contact list and more.
So be it! Call this a new beginning. Let the burdens that accumulated in that phone be gone! We start anew today. If you call and get my voicemail, be sure to leave your phone number. Thanks.
My typical night and day
I once lived a long time on 3 hours of sleep a night. In the long run, it hurt. I love to sleep and especially to dream but if I could take a pill and do away with sleeping, I’d be pill popping in a heartbeat. Over the years I have changed my habits from pulling alnighters and staying up until four in the morning to trying to consistently get to bed by 10pm. I know that if I get to sleep by 11:59pm that I sleep far better than if I go to sleep at 12:01am. If I get to sleep by 10pm, I can be up and productive at either 2am or 4am which makes for an astoundingly good day for me.
What really happens? I wander to bed at 10 or 10:30pm but lounge in bed chatting with my wife and watching television until midnightish. Between 2am and 2:30am, one of the dogs needs to be walked or rather she has formed the habit of going outside for a few minutes. I sit around for a few minutes and debating starting my day but acknowledge that on 2 hours of sleep my head is simply too fuzzy. I return to bed. At 4am, Evan wanders into our bed. I debate getting up but decide Evan will follow me so I conceded to another 30 minutes of sleeping. At 4:30am, I wake again and alter between cat naps and tossing and turning until between 5 and 5:30 at which time I finally get out of bed and try to get some work done before 6:15am. At 6:15am, Amy arises and I step away from the computer. If I spend time on the computer between 6:15 and 7am, she misses her bus. From 6:15 to 6:55, I make Amy’s lunch, chat with Amy, prompt Noah to brush his teeth, and then drive Amy to the bus stop. From 7:15 to 8:15am I try to get another hour’s work done but this is dependent upon whether or not Evan has awoken and whether or not Noah has missed his bus and needs a ride or Sarah needs a ride. Between 8:30 and 9am Monday through Friday, I am carpooling either Tommy or Evan to school. At 9:30 I am typically back at my desk trying to get work done. If I eat lunch, I take it at my desk. At 2pm, I will grab a 15-20 minute power nap and return to work by 2:30. At 5 or 5:30pm, I break to prepare dinner for the kids. This break typically extends to 7pm. I’m usually back on the computer no later than 8 and try to work until 10pm when the cycle begins again.
That is par for the course Monday through Friday. I try to avoid working on Saturday. I like to get up early on Sunday and try to work at least through lunch.
Update: A friend asked, "why doesn’t Cathy do the morning with the children?" There’s far more duties than what I’ve described with 5 children. She is not a morning person. We have no dishwasher so she hand washes the constantly barrage of dirty dishes our family produces. Our washer and dryer run 24/7 and she does all the folding (I’ve been forbidden from doing laundry…something about doing it wrong. Thank you Bill Cosby!). She handles all the school paperwork, homework, supplies, schedules and with 5 children in 5 schools there is plenty of that! She gets all the children’s clothing and backpacks laid out the night before so our mornings go smoothly. She also does the carpool pick-ups to balance my carpool drop-offs. She handles medical appointments, dentist, extracurricular activities, etc. The children also have their chores and areas of expectation. We are not the Duggars but we have a system that works for our tiny large family. I think we have a machine that runs pretty smooth but I certainly wouldn’t turn Mary Poppins away if she showed up on our doorstep.
Of Grasshoppers
Student: Is this what failure feels like?
Master: Have you quit?
Don’t jump in front of cars!
Squirrels must have terribly stressful lives. The number of squirrels trying to suicide themselves in front of my car seems to increase everyday!
My Clients Now Get P3P Privacy Policies
Does your website collect identifying information on your visitors? If you think because you do not sell anything, ie. no shopping cart, and have no subscription services that you are not collecting identifying information on your site’s visitors then you are probably wrong. Most web servers log IP addresses along with the time of the visit and what that IP address read. ISPs keep logs showing which IP addresses were allocated to what users at particular times. Your logs can be correlated to their logs to identify a person. If your site as a comment form then you are definitely collecting information but more importantly that form gives you a name of a person to associate with the IP address without having to involve the ISP.
So now that we are clear that you are probably collecting identifying information about the visitors to your site, do you have a privacy policy? A privacy policy states how you will use that identifying information. For instance, perhaps you sell it to mailing lists. Or perhaps you specifically do NOT sell it to mailing lists but aggregate it to be able to explain to your potential advertisers that 70% of your site’s visitors are women between the ages of 22 and 35.
If you have a privacy policy, as a human, I can follow the link to that policy, read it, and try to interpret it. But why should I do that when I may not even understand what I’m reading? Shouldn’t the browser or other software handle the privacy policy for me? Yes! And on April 16, 2002 the W3C recommended the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project or P3P which is "a machine-readable language that helps to express a website’s data management practices." What this comes down to is that you can set your privacy preferences in your browser and if the website’s policy does not match, the browser blocks cookies from that site. Certainly there is a bit more to it than that but for most users, it boils down to blocking cookies.
P3P is a bit of a pain in the neck but every website (and that means your blogs) should have a privacy policy. This is definitely something I will encourage of each of my clients.
I’m heating Knoxville
I want a Christmas tree. Not the kind with pine needles but the kind you find in a submarine that tells you which hatches are open. With the beautiful weather we have been experiencing, our windows open during the day. The nights are a little to chilly. Of late, the heater has been turned on to combat the cold, but much to my chagrin, at least one window seems to remain open each night. If you have noticed slightly warmer days in Knoxville, you can thank my family and my elevated electric bill.
Too stressed to type
Thy todoth list overfloweth. Nay, thine own muse shouts silence. Gagged. Hiding in thy shadows within the deepest recesses of mine own mind. Today’s stories shall be passed upon to giveth thy brain a necessary reprieve such as tomorrow’s adventures shall be retold with vigor! William eat thine own heart out with a spork!
