Blog

I turned a Quad IV into a Quad II! I had a small panic attack and didn’t want to work so I turned toward office cleaning and made some major headway! I found floor!

Just incase you live in the nine counties and didn’t hear, my daughter wants M&Ms.

This morning Sarah missed the bus again. My fault for leaving the house late and it took a full hour to get her to school and back (that included some sitting and waiting for the bus time). I returned to find that I had written down my client meeting in my calendar as 9:00am but was basing my travel time on the 9:30am written on the family calendar. Met the client for 2 hours then went to KUB and got frowned at. Apparently my offering wasn’t large enough. Returned home to try to save Cathy from Amy the Destructor. Two days of folding clean clothes have been launched from the couch and all bedrooms demolished.

The next 45 minutes will be on lunch and trying to slip in some cleaning. Then I spend the rest of the afternoon frantically trying to get programming done.

I’m trying to make one home repair a day. Yesterday I cleared the clog in the condensation drain and reattached the pipe (using duct tape!). The a/c is on!

I woke at midnight, 2am, 3:30, and 4 but could not pull myself from bed until 4:45. I need to start running.

I’ve hit that "I’m really too tired but must keep on going" stage.

I hit another milestone. Now users can only have 1 test in progress at a time. If a “new test” is begun all old attempts are removed. My error? I was recording the new attempt then deleting all unpassed attempts (which happened to include my freshly started new attempt).

This is killing me. Amy is bawling because she wants to go outside and play but she’s not dressed and I’m trying to get something major completed in the next half hour so I can get an email off by close of business.

I’m denying her the outside. That’s evil!

I’ve probably been at the computer a good 9 hours today which rocks. But I could stand to put in another 14 hours. The afternoons particularly on these beautiful days are just so hard especially at task changing time. Focus. Focus. Focus!

I have hit a good stopping point on one task and am now refocusing on the next major programming task. Accomplish feels good!

YES! I learned much about using the PHP function usort() to sort arrays of objects. Much fun! I’ll have to write it up sometime. That was a major roadblock and super milestone for one client.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hiking in the Smokies with 9 women!

We started out by using my favorite shortcut through Metcalf Bottoms to get to the Sugarland Visitor’s Center where the Girls Scouts had the unique pleasure of speaking with Toni, the oldest Ranger in the park. Toni’s grandmother raising 13 children by herself owned acreage across the street from where the Visitor’s Center now sits and sold the land to the government for $11 an acre then turned to servantship for the rich women of Pigeon Forge. She spoke to the girls of “Leave No Trace” and took questions. It was quite a treat for the girls (although they may not appreciate it for years to come) and I’ve never heard them so quiet. I followed Toni’s talk with a quote from the forward of Caves of Tennessee

Take nothing but pictures;
Leave nothing but footprints;
[Waste]* nothing but time.

*I remembered the quote wrong. “Waste” should have been “Kill”.

I could have listened to Toni for hours!

We started our hikes at the Sugarland Nature Trail which is a paved path slightly less than a mile long and circular. The book Great Smoky Mountains National Park Scavenger Hike Adventures and Mountain Journal by Kat LaFevre and John LaFevre kept the “I’m bored”s at bay and encouraged the girls to move along the trail.

We had lunch at Noah Ogle‘s house.(see picture and see some of the hike). The amount of vandalism was depressing. Please don’t write or carve on historic structures! Your damage cannot be undone! We hiked the more rugged 1.2 kilometer trail. The girls were so noisy that I believe all the wildlife in the Smokies quite possibly ran to the Rockies. In trying to keep the group together and help them be observant of the nature around them, I was just as loud or louder than the girls. As if to prove a point to them, a deer showed up on the trail. After that the girls were very quiet! We also saw fresh, what we thought to be, bear cub prints in the mud. This makes me think perhaps it was a fox.

A great time was had by all! Of course, we ended our day at Little Rivers for ice cream.

I just spent 20 minutes writing a beautiful post to have it vanish into the ether!

The lesson: Before publishing a post, cntl-a to select all, then if the post fails you can try again with a cntl-v to paste your post.

I grew up moving a lot. Each move represented a promotion for Dad and a greater opportunity for the family. We moved from a termite infested efficiency to a house my grandfather rented to us to our first owned fixer-upper property (much akin to the house I own now) to our newly built house to our first built-to-spec two-story Jamestown to a nice brick home on a wooded lot in Germantown, TN. From there I went to college and the moving around becomes somewhat a different story.

Each move to me represents a definitive chapter in my life telling a story of growth, moral lessons, trials and tribulations, happiness, sadness and an array of other Hollywood type themes. With each move, the extravert in me emerged more and more. My desire to have friends squelched any shyness until my junior year of high school. I was a sophomore in New Jersey and a junior in Tennessee. I started off with a desire to focus on studies and ignore people as we would just be parting company in a matter of two years. Little did I know that about half the 674 people in my graduating class would come with me to Knoxville. No matter; I could not contain the extravert.

A side-effect of the moving was that I didn’t develop a history. I didn’t get to know my family and could not appreciate their roots, my ancestors, nor could I carry on any of their legacies. Likewise, my friends could not know or share my history. Others, the hometowners, would tell shared stories that spanned their entire lives. I had trouble developing bonds with people. No matter how badly I wanted closeness of a friend or girl friend, no matter how badly I wanted to develop platonic or even emotional relationships I just could not overcome a sense of distance, unacceptance, separation, and alienation. Something always seemed to be missing.

When I was about 11, the neighborhood kids gathered for a game of baseball. I wasn’t invited. In hindsight, probably nobody was…they probably just gathered. I had a red bike I named Mickey because it had a big sticker of Mickey Mouse on it; in a similar way I named our gray cat, Gray; and our cat with two different colored paws, TwoPaws; and this is why I’m not allowed to name our children. I rode my bike back and forth near the yard where the game was being played becoming more and more incensed that here I was in plain view yet I still was invisible to the people I wanted so desperately to call “friends.” Finally someone, a girl named Angie I think, looked up and asked if I wanted to play. My reward had come! But I could not accept it. I had to snub them they way they snubbed me so I declined and rode off to spend some alone time. Yes, in hindsight it was a rather demented way to think.

I was always at peace with myself particularly if I was surrounded by nature. I would go to a pond, climb a tree and sleep in its branches. I found solace on the tops of buildings at shopping centers. I disappeared in acres of undeveloped woodlands trying to get lost. I hung out at Lake Pontchartrain playing on the levees and rested spread eagle on my back at the end of the airport runway watching 737s take off 100 feet over my head. I danced near the railroad tracks trying to convince myself to hop on a boxcar and see where it would go but in the end I was more interested in finding my smashed pennies than explaining to Dad why I needed to be flown home from Chicago.

Similar feelings and experiences carried over to college but that’s a different story. In the past I intentionally kept myself closed to the world and was an emotionless husk. I did not want closeness. Today I am a far different person with great openness and emotionally exposed. However, when the stress and tension rises I find myself having to fight hard to not retreat within. It would not be healthy for my family but sometimes I just want to shut myself off from the rest of the world.

[Note: On the same day as the baseball game I found a key in the road in Kenner, LA that some 7 or 8 years later would open the trunk of my newly purchased Triumph Spitfire 1500 in Germantown, TN.]

“managed MAPI service catastrophic error”

First bit of research brings up to this site with these possibilities:
1)

The message « Managed MAPI Service Catastrophic Failure » appears to come from a wrong configuration from the Anti-Spam feature of Norton internet security.

To test if this applies to you can:

Launch Symantec Internet Security from the “active icon bar” or how ever your PC is setup;
Click the “Norton Antispam” button;
Click on the “Allowed list” link;
Click on the “Configure” button;
Click the “Import Address Book” button;

In doing so you should see the message « Managed MAPI Service Catastrophic Failure » appear …. Answer OK (once or more depending on how many MAPI are wrongly configured)… And the last message would be “Norton AntiSapm did not find any new addresses”; click OK…. And “OK”; And proceed to next step….

To correct the problem you can configure your Anti-Spam and remove unused services:

From the area titled “Email”, click the “Client integration” button;
In this window, make sure only services you are using are checked; (Outlook, outlook express….); Click OK when done;

To test if configuration is correct, click the “Import address book” again, the message should no longer appear; if you have unchecked the correct services…

---

The response: OK, cool, that works.

2)

It is an Outlook problem! Delete the ‘Business Manager Contacts’ data file and you are smooth sailing. It really is as simple as that. It took me 2 weeks to figure this out. I saw some info on the web that the Busines Manager Contacts feature causes probelms, but not

3)

Are you using Outlook 2003.
Symantec’s web site says this is a known problem, run live update

Mine went away through the use of magic. (And having Outlook already open when I tried to send email from MapPoint)

It makes me so sad to see needless construction. Satellite imagary shows acres of woods behind my neighborhood being torn down to build houses. That acreage should be preserved and used to connect 4 neighborhoods by greenways and trails. It would be astounding to have a habitat for deer and birds and other wildlife in this part of town that several neighborhoods could enjoy all the while connecting these neighborhoods to the Rocky Hill baseball field.

Once its gone, it’s gone for good.

And what’s more sad is that I don’t have the time, money, energy or political prowess to do anything about it. In my apathy I haven’t even tried calling the Greenways Commission.