So we’ve decided to sell our current home and buy another one. Yep… I said it. We’re buying a new home. Sure we’ve only had this one for two years, but we figure we can make a little profit off of this one, pay off all of our bills, and find a place closer to work and with a bigger yard. It’s kind of a tall order (I’ve only skimmed the surface of our requirements), but we should be able to do it.
It’s a good thing I finished the fence finally. 
Holy smokes, kids… daddy’s been working his tail off the last few weeks. I’m currently on my 11th straight day of work, and I am super tired! Lots of cool stuff is happening, but I haven’t had to get down and dirty like this for a while.
Sadly that means that I’ve not only had ~4-5 hours of sleep a night, but I haven’t really been able to spend any time with Kimberly or the kids. Quality Time has been lacking, as of late. Luckily Fathers Day is this coming Sunday, so I’ll be able to have a much needed rest.
was hesitant to post this since I’m fairly superstitious and this is one of those things that could easily be reverted, but last November I stopped biting my fingernails. I know, I know… it’s gross, etc., but it was a habit of mine for 30-something years, and those types of habits are hard to break.
I’ve attempted this many times before; I even used those hot-pepper polishes and tried a bunch of other techniques, but nothing ever worked. Then one day I was driving the kids home and there was Evan with his finger in his mouth and his nail on his teeth and I thought to myself “NO!”. I don’t want him to grow up like that. So I stopped right there and I’ve been free from nail biting ever since.
I find that I still instinctively move my hands to my mouth every now and again, but I always keep from actually biting them. I’m pretty darned proud of myself, actually. Quitting smoking in 1994 was much easier than stopping the nail biting.
I’ve been looking to buy a digital camera recently so I checked Google for reviews, I poured over hundreds of Amazon.com product pages for features, and I searched high and low for folks who had/have owned digital cameras and sought their help. Tonight I made a purchase at my local Best Buy; a Sony DSCP200 7.2MP digital camera.
I talked the ear off the poor guy at the digital camera desk at Best Buy, and I’ll bet he was sorry that he asked me if I needed any help! He was very informative and wasn’t pushy about anything at all, which was nice. After about a half hour of questions, specification/feature comparisons, and in-store demoing I had my camera. I even bought the extended warranty, which I usually don’t, but the $60 for 4 years of service seemed like a good deal, especially with all of the features the service has (like if it’s not in pieces, they’ll replace it).
Tonight I received a phone call from an old friend, Doug, whom I haven’t talked with or even seen in, oh, about 5 years or more. We spoke for about an hour and a half catching up on what’s been going on in each other’s lives, how the families are doing, etc. It was really nice to hear from him.
Of course, when you don’t hear or speak with someone for years you get a mixed bag of news: some good, some bad; but it also brings to light how quickly time goes by. Marriages, divorces, births, deaths… things that happened over a decade ago still feel like new but when you really begin to think about them bits and pieces of the details of the event(s) get lost in your memory.
Me? I’m horrible about communicating with friends, even those I live near much less went to high school with. I wish I was better at it (especially since I used to be), but I’m not. The best way to catch me is via email, or even better is to meet me face to face; I’m great at conversation but not so hot when it comes to the phone or (ick) snail mail. But I hope to get better about contacting the people I know and love. At least I got Doug’s email address… so now I really have no excuse.
Not a good one, at least.
It’s a well-known fact that Lady Luck rarely smiles upon me and today was no exception. Or so it seemed.
It’s moving day for my mom and I’m playing the role of the (main) moving man. I’m not into the job for more than an hour or two when I get a call from my CTO. No problem… I’m a manager for the Web Development group so I have a lot of responsibility and gladly help out when I can. Long story short is that there was a problem with a new web app we recently released to some vendors and they need my brain to help fix the problem. I’m a team player, so no big deal. It’s not like I was out of state or anything, so I agree to come in and do it — all the while thinking that I can probably fix it within an hour and get back to moving my mom out from her old place and into the new one. Everyone seems surprised when they see me back at the office(s), but hey… that’s just me. I do what I can, when I can, and if I can.
Three hours later I call my boss and tell him I’m still at work and between the proverbial “rock and a hard place” insofar as wanting to fix the problem but needing to move my mom since it’s her last day in her old apartment and all the help I had lined up for the day has come and gone. At this point my boss offers to see if he an wrangle up some volunteers to help finish my mom’s move so I can concentrate on the problem at hand.
A few hours later my mom has all of her stuff out of her old apartment and into her new one thanks to the the help from several co-workers; plus the problem at work is fixed and happiness ensues across the land. Well; at least it does in our little neck of the woods. This is a perfect example of why I love my job and my co-workers… no matter what the problem is we all pitch in to solve it quickly.
When I first made my way into the field of Web design/development I stumbled across a design firm that became an inspiration to me: Vivid Studios. They were so much of an inspiration to me that I even bought their book “Careers in Multimedia”.
Sadly they are no longer in operation (vivid.com now belongs to the XXX company Vivid), but every now and then I check out some of their former-employee’s personal sites (like Nathan, Val, Drue, and others) to see what they are up to these days.
I was doing just that when I saw a link on Nathan Shedroff’s site to vividstudios.org; and what did I find but what appears to be a snapshot of Vivid’s final site design!
I used to visit their site constantly to see what the Vividians (as they called themselves) were up to in part because their culture of fun and creativity at work seemed like a refreshing new idea, but also because I secretly wished I was a part of their team. In fact the Vivid business strategy/methodology section of their website is what first piqued my interest in project management, design specs, and the like.
Thank you, Nathan, for bringing back the Vivid website.
Maybe Kimberly and I are crazy, but I think we just had a little earthquake happening in our neck of the woods… Kimberly’s (nearly) asleep and I’m finishing some PHP in the home office and it felt as if the whole house was shaking a bit; almost like someone was running or walking heavily outside of our respective rooms.
<update id=”moments_later”>
Yep! We sure did have a 3.2 earthquake according to the University of Washington and the USGS confirms it on their website! Very exciting stuff… the last earthquake I personally experienced was about 8 months before Evan was born and I was driving at the time. My car starts shaking and I didn’t even realize it was an earthquake until I noticed the streetlights and traffic signals swaying in the air.
Anyhow, here’s what UW said (in brief):
A minor earthquake occurred at 0:18:18 AM (PST) on Friday, January 16, 2004.
The magnitude 3.2 event occurred 4 km (2 miles) E of Bremerton, WA.
The hypocentral depth is 54 km (34 miles).
You can check out a topographic map of the quake area as well if you like.
</update>
Wired, in a recent article regarding how cell phones with cameras may soon be able to also be barcode scanners, turns on a former advertiser by saying “The CueCat — that pesky bar-code scanner from Digital Convergence — may be dead…”. “Pesky”? Um, I still have a CueCat that Wired sent me with the Wired brand name imprinted on the side of it. Apparently they weren’t pesky when they shipped thousands of them out.
As you may or may not know, the CueCat, by Digital Convergence, was basically a flop of an “advertising scheme”, especially once folks figured out how to use it to convert the CueCat into a generic barcode reader; and most people thought it was silly (at best). Check out Joel Spolsky’s review of the CueCat.
Our good friends Rachel and Spencer have become the newest parents in our circle of friends, with the birth of their lovely daughter Aidan Jane. Congratulations to you all!
