From the mouths of babes
Evan, 4 years old: "Dad, can you make me some chips?"
Me, noting that it is 5:20pm: "No."
Evan, softening voice, tilting head, and putting on droopy eyes: "Please make me some chips."
Me: "No, I’m working. You have to let me finish my work so that I can make dinner. NO no no."
Evan: "Okay. But please."
Me: "I’ll be right up. Just let me make this one blog post."
On Freelancing
Rule 417: You will work every bit as hard or harder on small, low budget jobs as you will on large jobs.
Note: This rule is unbreakable.
Dear Beer Fairy…
…I still believe in you!
My affair with Jott
I was amazed with Jott when it first came out and it quickly became my favorite memory aid, mind declutterer, and to-do list organizer. Jott allows you to speak a message and have it transcribed to your Jott dashboard, Twitter, Remember The Milk, Google Calendar and many more services. It works through a combination of speech recognition and human transcribers. Then the honeymoon ended and Jott brought its free version to a close. I recently deemed this tool important enough to me to sign up again and it has already paid for itself.
I let Jott send me reminders to both SMS and email. Our neighborhood lacks an association so I sent myself a note. This is what Jott sent me in email. (Click the picture for a larger view) Thank you Jott! Shh. Don’t tell Cathy.
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.
The local area network issue
My home network has my development servers on it. One is an antique Windows 2000 server which is currently out of commission for bad memory, and the other is a Ubuntu Linux workstation tweaked to run SAMBA, PHP, MySQL etc. Used to be any machine on the LAN could open up Windows Explorer (or Ubuntu’s Places) and surf to another machine: My Network Places -> Entire Network -> Microsoft Windows Network -> Workgroup and then see all the machines on the network and browse to a shared folder. Now I get an 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.
The list of server for this workgroup is not currently available.
And from Linux (Places->Network->Windows Network):
Unable to mount location
Failed to retrieve share list from server
It’s conceivable that the Windows 2000 server was acting as a domain controller but the LAN is setup on workgroups not domains. Let’s assume the source of this problem is the now semi-retired Windows 2000 server. My home router is a D-LINK DIR-615. So the challenge is to get either the router or the Linux box to fill whatever role the Windows 2000 server used to perform to make my network browseable. Please note that if I refer to the machines specifically, I can still work with files from that machine. So \\mickymouse\familypics would still allow the family pictures to be seen all over the house. The problem is the same for printer sharing. I cannot browse to a shared printer but if I know the \\machinename\sharename I can setup a remote machine to print to the shared printer.
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.
Today’s simple goal
Repair one computer. Done!
Dreams last night
Intense. Technicolor. Hollywood quality. I could have stayed in a coma enjoying these dreams indefinitely.
Dads, journals, cliques and swag
Now Dads can have drama and swag too! Move over Blogher. The Dad Blogs Convention has arrived.
Labor dispute
Google Wave Invites and Reciprocation
Wow! Mention "Google Wave invite" er…nomination or simply "I have a Google Wave account" and you have friends coming out of the woodwork that you never knew you had! Actually that word friend is fuzzy in meaning to me in this new age of social networking. I mean, most of the people who have begged me for an invitation to Google Wave are people I’ve never heard of. And not one, not one!, has offered me so much as a steak dinner in exchange for the invite…er, nomination. People! These things are going for $80 on eBay.
So who should get the 8 invites that came with my account? Well.. no one else because I’ve given all mine out. But who should have received them? My clients. See, Google Wave is about collaboration. At least that is my take on it. So, to get an invite from me, you should have said, "Doug, I know you have PHP and CF skills. Hook me up on Google Wave and let’s run a small project through this together." That’s call equitable plus it uses the tool as is designed. Instead I feel like I’ve largely been approached by strangers wanting to declare "I have a Google Wave account before anyone else. My penis is large!"
Now let’s talk about these invites Unlike GMail where Google genuinely offered invitations that allowed me to instantly bring someone else into the project, Google Wave is offering nominations. (Btw, I still have 99 invitations to GMail if anyone needs one and those are free!) If a nomination is truly a nomination, then the more of these that you get, the faster you will get to the front of the line. If you want to test this theory and have invitations available, contact my wife @cathymccaughan and send her an invite..er, nomination, and let’s drive her to the front of the line. I have seen no documentation that indicates 10 invites..er, nominations, will get you to the line faster than one but it seems sensible to me. We could start a Wave about this but you’ll need an invite..er, nomination first.
Who got my invites? My invitations went out to friends, family and clients with whom I may actually collaborate. If you didn’t get one, that means 1) that maybe I added you to my nomination list and your invite just hasn’t gone out yet or 2) I simply ran out of invites..er, nominations before I got to you. My apologies.
New things I tried today
I tried Google Wave and see great potential in collaboration. I also see Google Wave treading into Facebook’s territory not Twitter’s. Mashable has the best write-up thus far including a reference to Google Wave’s advance serarch commands. Robert Scoble discusses the overhype and sums up the problem I’m trying to get my head around "noise" and "I don’t know where to look".
I tried TinyChat which is a video chat service that promises to supplant Skype but the true potential is in the features included in the $14.95/mth price. The video quality is high. The features are well integrated into the user interface. I think this could be a lot of fun for synchronous chat but I question why use TinyChat instead of ustream.tv or Livestream.
I’ve also tried Twirl TV which looks a lot like Hulu for the networks. They also claim to only be letting the first 10,000 people in.
Prevent Compatibility View
Internet Explorer 8 introduced a button beside the address bar that looks like a rectangle with a break through its middle. If you click it, Internet Explorer reports, "Compatibility View on" but the button does not clearly indicate if compatibility view is on or off. Compatibility view is Internet Explorer 8 pretending to be Internet Explorer 7. To prevent your website visitors from clicking this button, simply make it go away:
Include either the following meta element (which in invalid in HTML5) on your page <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"> (before any script elements!) or set the following HTTP header on your page: X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge
[Source, hsivonen.iki.fi, Activating Browser Modes with Doctype]
