Ultranormal

  • Wow, at the bottom of

    Wow, at the bottom of yesterday’s post, I mentioned Tardy from Greg the Bunny and today I’ve gotten over a dozen visits from people who found me by way of Google searches for Tardy from Greg the Bunny. Google is amazing.

  • Too Much To Say

    Max woke us up last night crying. That usually means he’s lost his pacifier and just needs help finding and reattaching it to his face. I hopped out of bed, wandered down the hall and when I opened the door was attacked by a smell I don’t remember smelling before. It was a combination of vinegar, summer deli dumpster and dill pickle juice. Max had puked all over himself, his clothes, and his bed. I grabbed him, ran him to the bathroom, fired up the tub, stripped him down, wrapped him in a towel and held him until the tub was ready. He was shaking uncontrolably, and visibly uncomfortable, so I put him in the tub, washed him off quickly, washed the vomit from his hair, grabbed him out of the tub, dried him off, ran him downstairs, put on a fresh diaper and put clean jammies on him. Just as I was standing him up to pull his flannel pants up, he let loose another pink deluge of partially digested food all over me and the towel. I caught most of it either on me, or the towel, sparing him the need for yet another change of clothes. The smell, again, was amazing. I had to fight back my own heaves just to keep catching chunks and hold him up so he didn’t fall off the changing table.

    It was great fun. Jen and I spent the next two hours on the couch with him in my lap. I held the bucket and did my best to catch the ensuing expulsions. I’m pretty proud of myself. I only missed the first part of the first one after we sat down, and that was only because he overshot. I was able to catch the rest in the bowl, keeping him nice and dry and me less puke-stinky. Jen sent me to bed after it looked like he was all done and worn out. She laid down on the floor in his room with him, and I tried to get back to sleep. I think I may have gotten about 4 hours of sleep, but it wasn’t very restful. He’s feeling much better today, although he’s fighting eating the blah food and will only eat popsicles or pedialyte.

    I think we handled the whole thing really well. No one flipped out. We didn’t call our parents crying for help. We did what we could do for him and comforted him the best way we knew how. I think I’m getting the hang of this parenting thing…

    I’m exhausted, but at work toiling away on my big project. There are so many things I’ve wanted to write about this week but haven’t had the time to, like Greg the Bunny, and how I want to start a Tardy fan club. The show is brilliant. I hope it lasts longer than Steve Levitan’s last show (which was also very good, but stuck in the morass that NBC Thursday night has become – Must Cancel TV), Stark Raving Mad. I was going to talk about this whole “warblogging” thing, but it’s old and getting older the more I read. I want to talk about James Lee Burke and how everyone should read him, how much I love to hate the South, the joys of toddlers and the many things I’ve learned about being married. But, they’ll have to wait for some other time. Now, it’s back to work and answering the minute-by-minute e-mails flooding my box.

  • They cancelled Ally McBeal

    They cancelled Ally McBeal, which is just as well. I cancelled it at the beginning of the season. That new girl was kind of cute, but it turned into The Muppet Babies with Mini-Ally running around with Mini-Greg and Old Ally watching them all jealous. It was a good show in its prime, but it ran its course. Bye bye, Ally.

  • Best line of the day

    Best line of the day so far:

    I was in training this morning, and while we were working on one of the in-class examples, the instructor started whistling. Without thinking I said, “Please don’t whistle while we work.” Ok, written out, it’s not that funny, but it was funny in context.

  • Etc

    • I updated my linux newbie page to tell you how to start XWindows from the command prompt.

    • Also, if you were planning on installing YellowDog Linux 2.2 on a newer quicksilver G4 – don’t. Let me save you the trouble. There’s a problem with the new kernel and the installer that will totally hose you. Stick with 2.1 for now. It’s safer. Install and the product work great on my crap old Powerbook, but not my new machine. Go figure.

  • It’s never a good idea

    It’s never a good idea to eat Tums when you have a cough drop in your mouth. The Tums get all over the drop and make it extremely nasty… just thought I’d share.

  • Done done and done

    I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel of the craziness that is work. I’ve submitted what I was supposed to for QA today. I have one more that has to go tomorrow, but it’s done and ready to go. The thing that was in QA before is out and installed and all is well.

    I had to come in really early today and now I’m exhausted. I’m trying to cut down on my carbonated caffeine vehicle consumption, but I’m sorely tempted to go get a Code Red and Dr. Pepper and just forget the new rules today.

    I found an old post today that made me smile. That was over six months ago. I still feel that way, and I’ve done a lot more cool stuff since then.

    I’ll try to come back and share something coherent, but everything’s so secretive today, and I’m too tired to remember what I can say and what I can’t that I think I’ll just shut up.

  • Sorry, Sweetie

    I have a new love. It’s not really new, but I just thought I’d spout off a bit about how much I love this part of my life. Linux, I love you. I love you so much in fact that I want to write a sonnet to you. I just moved a bunch of stuff around my gigantic linux box here, added a user (because he’s going to use my box to run something for my new group and he needed access to the pages and tcl directories). I was able to add him as a user both of the system and the db, move the pages and tcl directories, change permissions on them to allow him to use them, and bounce the server all in about 3 minutes. If I were using… Solaris, that would have taken much longer. Why? Because Linux has nice GUI-based tools for doing this stuff. Solaris may be rock-solid and everything, but Linux is leagues ahead in ease-of-use and in most distributions, bundled software. Everytime I have to help someone set up Solaris, I have to spend several hours downloading things like gcc, make, gzip, emacs, etc. You’d think Sun would give you the option to choose what you want to install. “Is this a developer workstation? Ok, we’ll install the stuff you’ll use every day.” or “You’re going to set this up as a big huge server? Ok, we’ll only install the OS and you can configure the rest.”

    Plus, Linux is just fun. It’s a great tinkering OS. You can get under the hood if you want and play around with services, compiling software, etc. Or, if you’re just into playing with the surface, you can skin just about everything.

    It’s funny. The more I use Linux and Mac OS X, the less I like Windows. I started on Windows and still use it at home and as my main machine at work because I’m just more comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean I like it. I’m kind of tied to it. Why? I work at AOL and we have to use the AOL Client to get mail, and everyone sends docs in Word format. I know all the arguments for StarOffice, KOffice, etc, but I just can’t get into them. Plus, I like to play UT and Jedi Knight too much to give it up.

    I like having all my options open. I love being able to switch from one OS to the other without much difficulty. It’s a great time to be a geek!!!! (and yes, I know this whole ramble was incoherently geeky – so sue me)

  • Stupid

    I was going to write about this last night, but it would have been overly profane and who needs that on their conscience when I know at least my mother-in-law reads this stuff? The last episode of Once and Again aired last night on ABC. It was depressing and it ended poorly. The last episode didn’t measure up (how could it). I don’t know how I wanted it to end, just that it shouldn’t have. It was a great show, as I’ve said before. Oh well. That was the last show I paid attention to on ABC, and probably will be for a good long while. See ya later, Disney. I’ll miss the show, but that’s life. Maybe I’ll read a book.

    Crap segue….

    Yes, I know I didn’t write anything yesterday. I spent many hours on the phone with lawyers this weekend and many more hours working on Monday. Nope, still can’t talk about what this is all about, but it should happen soon. It’s exciting and frustrating to be working on something that will be so huge. People aren’t sleeping and that makes them crabby. They snap and bark and well, they’re no fun to be around. There are conference calls with many people, most of whom don’t understand what’s being said and are relegated to sighing into the phone and taking notes. I’ve been to so many meetings in the past week I’m about to go crazy. I hate meetings. I hate telling people what to do, why they need to do it that way and then having to explain it slower because they didn’t get it the first time.

    I want to work. I want to write code and make things cool and sustainable, maintainable, scalable, etc. I can’t do that in a conference room with a dozen people around a table deciding what not to call things. And on that note, I’m going to get to work…

  • Dude, I thought he was going to crap himself

    I came up with a great line in a meeting the other day. We were talking about bad news, of which I had dispensed a large amount that day. I decided then and there that I’m going to buy a box of Depends adult diapers and start bringing them to all my meetings. For severe bad news, I’ll galantly offer them to the recipient before I give them the news and helpfully offer, “You might want to put these on,” before I launch into the painful topic. It seems the charitable thing to do.

    Yes, that was a much better idea than my idea to start distributing a screen saver that would take processing power from people and use it to serve out http requests. I thought it was brilliant. It could end up being the world’s largest web server. I have no idea how it would work. It obviously wouldn’t work for serving out files since everyone would have to have the files on their machine, but for dynamic requests that are processor-intensive (like, ahem, searches) why not? It makes perfect sense to me.