Author: Kevin Lawver

Web developer, Software Engineer @ Gusto, Co-founder @ TechSAV, husband, father, aspiring social capitalist and troublemaker.

The Party

It wasn’t as good as last year. I got us totally lost getting there. I hate driving in DC. I think the streets were laid out by dropping a bunch of tinkertoys on a map and calling it a day. To go about 80 miles roundtrip, we went 125. We went across the Key Bridge four times going, and thankfully only once on the way home (I swallowed my pride and bought a map on our second trip through McLean).

Ok, other than getting absolutely lost, the party was a little flat compared to last year. All the bands were lame cover bands with a slight twist. There were slight cover bands in techno, swing, blues and funk. They all covered the same songs. I think they were actually the same bands with one different instrument. Weird.

The rooms were themed with colors instead of actual themes. Last year, they did TV Shows, which rocked. The themes were actually themes, and each room had different things to do in it.

I’m praying that next year, they move the party back out to the suburbs to a larger location like last year.

I am The Norm. The

I am The Norm. The Norm is me. I consider it a point of pride that I keep my inbox empty at all times and deal with mail as it comes in. I don’t know why everyone can’t do that. I walk by my friends’ desks and they have an unconquerable mountain of mail. How do they live with themselves?

Published
Categorized as geekery

So, I’m sitting here at

So, I’m sitting here at my desk at work on a Saturday aftenoon. Why, you ask? Well, I forgot to bring the directions to the party home last night, and now I’m burning a couple CDs for the car trip to the party. I never realized how cool having a 100 CD-R’s, iTunes and a brand new G4 could be. I think I’ve burned 10-15 mix cd’s in the past two months, three or four Linux ISOs (that’s free software, baby…), and two backups CDs of all my project files. How cool is that?

I shaved off my beard last night as part of our “Beauty Night”. It was Jen’s idea. I shaved off my beard (thank you, beard clippers!). We did facials and had a Loofa Bath Party, where Jen hot-oil conditioned my hair. Then, we moisturized and went downstairs to watch Once and Again. I feel so pretty.

Published
Categorized as Kevin

The big company party is

The big company party is tomorrow night. We’re getting all dressed up, smiling, and going.

In a whole different world, I wanted to tell you the story of when I discovered that girls and boys are different.

I was 8 or 9. We lived on an Air Force base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. If you’ve never seen military housing, imagine hundreds of identical duplexes painted varying shades of horrible lined up on practically identical streets. Our house was the first row in a newer section. Our back yard faced a football field sized field where I think they were planning on adding more houses. The middle and high school kids used to use it after school for various practices. We never noticed them as we played Army Men, Hide and Seek, Secret Agent, Superheroes, Tag, Smear the Queer (does that game still exist – did they change the name?), Orphan Adventuring Kids or whatever else we played.

One day, the cheerleaders started practicing. They wore shorts and tiny t-shirts. All of a sudden, we noticed. Every Tuesday and Thursday at three, my brother (who was 6 or 7) and I would lie on the living room floor like concealed snipers and stare out the sliding glass doors as they jumped, formed unstable human pyramids and did their cheerleading things.

It wasn’t sexual. I don’t remember having dreams about them. I just remember watching them, and thinking they were very different from me. They weren’t girls to me. They were women, but not like the moms I knew. They were just different, older but not old. Grown-up but not adults.

I loved being 9. More than being 7 and hiding in our windbreak. We lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids who played. We ran through the woods, caught crawdads, found illicit hidden military things in the woods we weren’t supposed to touch or they’d come shoot us.

Published
Categorized as Kevin

Have you ever left something

Have you ever left something undone so long that now the the thought of doing whatever it was that was left undone is now twice as unpleasant as it was before? That’s how I feel about my “vacation beard”. I was going to let it grow for a week, just to see what happened. That week grew into two, which is now up to three. It’s thick enough that I know hardware other than a bic shaver will have to be involved. It will be electric, silver and noisy. I will likely try to do it in the morning, half awake. I will most likely leave a large patch of shubbery on my face and not notice it until I get to work. You now know the source of my fear. Pray for me.

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

It’s a holiday my family borrowed while we lived in Germany. Those crazy Germans. Somewhere around December 5th, all the little German kids put their shoes outside the door when they go to bed. Then, when they wake up the next morning, there’s a little present from St. Nick waiting for them in their stinky shoes. We loved it growing up. It was a little Christmas preview.

This year, I went a little crazy. I got the family a St. Nick present, and bought myself one too. The fam (my fam, not my extended fam) got a new VCR. I got myself a new PC Camera. It’s sitting on top of my monitor waiting to broadcast my fuzzy face. I just need to find some free webcam software. Any suggestions?

Published
Categorized as family

My Britney problem — and

My Britney problem — and yours – A great article from Salon about the pop princess and what she’s peddling. It’s a fascinating point of view. It makes it hard to think about having another kid. What if the baby’s a girl? It seems like such a herculean task to raise a girl today. I don’t know how I’d do. Raising a boy is pretty easy. They don’t discover girls until they’re 9 or 10, and even then, it’s in an ewww gross sort of way. Girls have it so much harder, and from an earlier age.

I’ll have to remember to tell my “Hey, she’s a GIRL.” story sometime.

Published
Categorized as music