Aren't ya glad ya know...

...that I have really bad gas?

Seriously, the wife made some awesome chili for dinner last night. I had 3 bowls of the stuff. But, she made it with the kidney beans we had in the cabinet instead of chili beans. Those kidney beans have some really fiberous skins on them. Needless to say, I've got gas that is more frequent and sulfurous than the eruptions on Old Faithful.

So, don't come into my cube at work or sit next to me on the train today. I'm a regular walking biological warfare agent.

Memories of when I still had cahones

I had a "make a basic web page about yourself" assignment due today for class. After reading the instructions I realized I had made such a page in about 1996 or 1997 as part of my moosehead.com web pages. So, instead of re-doing all that (poor) work I sucked it down from archive.org and re-did the links to make it work again. I've decided to do my entire class project as if I were still 25 years old.

So, you want to see it? This is the results. It's basically the same content I had up so many years ago with the links fixed to refer to my current webserver. Man, I sure was freaky. No wonder I scared children, eh?

Web pages 101

I started my new class last week*. It's WEB410 which is supposed to be a hard course right? I mean all the 400 level courses are supposed to be difficult. But, this is HTML 101. So, as long as I actually participate and keep up with the rather simplistic assignments I should get my sorry self an 'A'.

It's weird. Some of the earlier classes in Project Management and group dynamics were way more difficult than my recent technical classes. I guess being technically inclined and having previous experience with the subject matter slants my perspective on what is easy and what isn't. I bet that the Java programming and Database concepts classes would be tough for someone without previous exposure to such things.

-R

* I dropped out of college repeatedly when I was younger. First I joined the Army after completing only 18 credit hours of school. Then I attended about 2 and a half years of school on and off over the next 4 years earning about 30 viable credit hours. Life has me a bit more disciplined along with the need for a degree and I've polished off 36 credit hours over the past 2 years. I finish some time in the spring of 2006 at my current pace. Wish me perserverence.

Saturday morning with an itchy nose

It's bad enough that I have to work on a Saturday morning. I miss the kid's ballet and acting classes and can't do the chores that so badly need my attention. Plus, they start early on Saturdays here. Presumably it's to get done earlier and go home, but waking up earlier on a weekend than a weekday just sucks ass.

This morning was even yuckier for me. I went to bed early knowing I would have to get up early. But, the wife has the same cold except with a cough as I do. She kept me awake for an extra hour needing comforting and medication retrieval duties. When I finally got up in the morning my nose itched something horrible. It's been running and I've been blowing it all morning long. YUCK!

This afternoon is older daughter's 3rd birthday party. She actually turned 3 last Wednesday. but the party is today. She's going to a place where they dress the girls up as princesses and they have a tea party. Her older brother was very upset that he did not get to attend. I had to explain to him that he was not, nor ever would be, a princess. (Gh0d, I hope that lesson sticks... :)

The wife and I made the cutest things to give to her party guests instead of goody bags. She went to the Plano factory outlet (they make tackle boxes and stuff) and bought some small Kaboodles for each girl. Then she bought a bunch of cutesy stuff like roll on body glitter, cherry lip gloss, plastic play jewelry and other stuff little girls can safely play makeup with. We stuff some Disney Princess stickers on them and each girl is getting a stocked makeup case to take home with them. She got most of the stuff at a dollar store so it probably cost about $8 a girl. I think they'll love it!

Her party is at 4:00PM. I hope I get home from work in time to watch the boy and the baby so the wife can get older daughter to the party on time. Did I mention I HATE working on Saturdays?

Of STDOUT and STDERR (non-geeks may wish to skip)

I'm working on a project that is restricting access to root on certain systems by proxying the access through an agent that gives each user ACLs and logs everything. One of the other admins, who handles the log monitoring system, is using the network aware shell to distribute, run and capture results of the parser.

Because the client agent is cross platform capable it does some post processing on STDOUT and STDERR to handle \n, \n\r and ^M as well as tabstops and errant whitespace. This is, of course, messing up the log monitor script which captures STDOUT and STDERR and runs diff against the previous results. If anything changes it alerts. Hmmm, since the post processing is inconsistent the whitespace and carriage returns never seem to match up. The monitor has been throwing erroneous "something changed" messages since the switchover.

So, we've had to go the brute force method of redirecting 2&>1 to a file, pulling the file back to the central server and diff'ing two files instead of a file and a filehandle. Not elegant for sure, but it's working...

A weekend of sickness

Well, I called it last Friday. I got a doozie of a cold. Aching back, sore throat, cough, itchy eyes, runny nose and pleanty of sneezing. I called in sick to work on Monday, but the wife decided I was there to do chores for her and watch the kids so she could shop at the craft/scrapbooking stores. Needless to say, it was NOT restful. I went into work today all drugged up and am trying not to sneeze on my coworkers.

I did get to spend some time using my Mac over the weekend. The mother in law wanted prints of a bunch of digital pictures I'd taken. So, every piece of glossy photo paper I had was used to print 4-up 4"x5" pictures for her. St. Patrick's Day, the trip to the Chicago Museums campus, the zoo, the wedding the kids were in over the summer and my older daughter's first time dressed up in a leotard for ballet class. All that paper is gone and I'm not buying any more. The quality of the $0.25 per print images at the Walgreens are WAY better than the inkjet on photo paper I can print and only costs $0.04 more per print. Plus the store machine is faster. So, I'm not going to make photos at home anymore.

Anxiety over nothing

This morning I woke up worrying. I'm not exactly sure why and it wasn't about anything specific, just lots of little things. So, I nibbled my way through breakfast on the train with a knot in my stomache. I walked to work with the iPod going and tried to get into the music and stop thinking about "what if?"s. It sorta worked, there were moments of relief.

Now that I've gotten through over 2 hours of the work day and nothing has gone wrong I'm finally starting to relax. I can't tell if having that cup of coffee helped or made it worse. I know that if I got a headache from lack of caffeinne it would have been worse.

The only thing left to worry about now is the pittance I brought for lunch. We're on a tight budget and don't have the money to go out to eat for lunch. So, I'm supposed to bring my lunch every day. I'm on a low-carb diet so I can't just grab anything and run. This morning I grabbed a cheese stick, a protien bar and a diet soda for breakfast. But, lunch is only a protein shake and some mild cheddar from a chunk I have in the fridge. Dinner is going to be a long way from lunch and my tummy will be very grumbly about it. I guess if mild hunger pangs are the worst thing I have to stress over it'll be OK.

The grass or a haircut?

I need to decide what my chore for the evening is going to be. The grass definitely needs to get mowed, but my hair needs a serious trim too. I guess my hair can wait longer than the grass can, but the lazy part of me wants to do them in the opposite order.

Rain on mowing days

This mornign was supposed to be "mow the lawn" morning. I blew the chore off in favor of other chores on Saturday and Sunday because the kids spent the night at their grandparents and I figured I'd have time this morning. Of course it poured at about 6:00AM and has been drizzling since. Can't mow a soaking wet lawn and I don't liek driving the tractor in a drizzle.

So, now it looks like I get to hurry through the chore Tuesday after work. Oooh, fun...

I did enjoy spending the morning with the baby though (no, she didn't go on the sleepover only the older 2). We bounced and played and ate Cheerios, well ok she did those things. I just facilitated. She's such a happy baby. Even when she bonked her forehead on the chair leg when she fell over from sitting up she was calm and happy again within 5 minutes. Oh course the wife gave me all kinds of dirty looks for "letting" the baby hurt herself. I guess she had to be angry at someone, right?

Angst over watching the kids

This weekend the wife is having an all day scrapbooking party in our basement. So, I will be watching the kidlets, all 3, all day. They're fairly fun to spend time with but for some reason I get anxious about having to do it. I'm not sure why either. Until I'm actually spending the time with them it makes knots in my stomach.

I think it comes from feeling like I'm being deprived of "me time". But, I actually enjoy the time with the kids more than my "me time". Plus I get pleanty of "me time" every night after they go to sleep. The wife is very good about letting me do my thing from about 20:30'ish until snore time.

It must be something else that's got me fretting...

A productive day

I definitely sleep better after having sex. And I definitely have a more productive day at work after sleeping well. So, if you follow logic chains well...

I got a shitload of work done today. Between getting my stuff done and teaching a coworker a bunch of stuff she needed to learn, it was a darn good day.

Of course, I hope the energy lasts into this evening. I have quite a bit of work to get done at home tonight and wanting to veg on the couch isn't going to cut it. Must be confident. . .

I'm also super hungry. I didn't pack enough chow for lunch and ate it at like 11:30. So, by the time I get home I'll be famished. It doesn't help that I know what my wife is cooking for dinner and I've been craving Italian food for a while. Gh0d bless low carb pasta. I'd probably fall off the diet wagon into a lasagna without the stuff.

Frist p0st

This is my first post toi this BLOG. I created it so I could post comments to friend's BLOGs.

It's 18:05 on a Wednesday and I'm still friggin at work. No I don't want to be here but I drove in because the morning was hell. I got in at 10:00'ish and have to put in my 8+ hours or people get pissy. I missed my train this morning by about 2 minutes, then forgot my work ID. So, I would have called in sick but I had to give a presentation to 25+ people at 11:30 and it's not something that could be put off. At least that went well.