Category: Home Life

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Isaac is 8 Years Old Today

Isaac turned 8 today. It seems like so little time ago he was born at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, delivered 2 months early and at just under three pounds (due to Nichelle developing preeclampsia), after I made the still-talked-about mistake of having her read Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Small Assasin.” I thought she would find it ironic, given the situation. Wrong!

BLOG Updates

The BLOG has gotten a bit older, too. I’ve added a navigation structure (10 entries per page, now), and the masthead.

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The Fastest Computer

To quote a famous Bloom County comic strip: “Just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today’s cutthroat world of high-tech and high expectations…”

Nichelle here: We have a few people that come over to use our computers from time to time. One person, named Kherna, has used it on several different occasions. This morning David asked me, “which computer does Kherna use?” I pointed to the one on the right (we have two side-by-side), and his response was, “Why? That’s not the fastest!” I thought that was quite cute, seeing that he’s only 4 and knows the difference.

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Out of the Mouth of Babes

As we reflected on the day we set aside to celebrate the Resurrection, Nichelle asked David (age 4) what he had learned in Sunday school. He talked about Jesus being buried described the tomb, and said, “Then Jesus used His ‘rise up power.’”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard an adult explain it better.

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Goodbye to Los Quinlan

It’s a sad day for us, albeit for a good reason. Eric and Juana Quinlan, along with their sons James and John, are moving today to Georgia, to enroll in college for deaf ministries. Their goal is to work with ministries for the deaf in and around Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.

Eric has been my closest friend since early high school, and our families are very close.

I was actually somewhat responsible for Eric meeting Juana, way back when she was Juana Evangelista del Corazón de Jesus Gonzalez Guerrero, but I will save that story for later.

We will miss them greatly.

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The keys for the what?

This morning Nichelle was extremely kind, and took Isaac to school so I could sleep about another hour—trust me, I needed to.

Anyway, around 8:00 am, David knocked on the door, and I told him to come in. He had a set of keys from some toy handcuffs that had come with a police role-playing kit he’d been given. Now, understand that David is quite advanced in his speech for his age, so I was ROTFL when he said, he had the keys, but couldn’t find the cheese puffs they went to.

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Daaaaaaaaaaaagnabbit!

My workday ended with a whimper—demonstrating that I was missing a piece in my understanding of the data translator portion of the stuff we’re working on.

Then, I got an e-mail at home saying the CenterWatch project was not quite finished. Just a few revisions in the entire book, including two chapers that seem to have mismatched fonts.

At supper time, David’s question of the day was, “Where does the sun go at night?” His answer was quite interesting, more or less along the lines of the sun goes into space at night and comes out into the sky at daytime. There was something thrown in about gravity pulling it down. I demonstrated what really happens using a flashlight and a coffee cup, then remembered I had a globe in the basement, which would be even better for demonstration.

I got down in the basement to find 3 or more inches of water throughout, meaning that when John told me on Saturday the “thing was flooded” he meant it. (I thought we’d just had a puddle on the non-sump-pump end.)

After wrestling with the sump pump for a few minutes (thankfully it wasn’t bolted to the floor), I discovered the float on the float switch had become detached from the shaft. Now it’s back working, but life was full of surprises today.

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MyDomain Forwarding Problems—Another Casualty of War

See http://forum.mydomain.com/viewtopic.php?t=1537

The mydomain forwarding service is currently experiencing problems and will be taken down temporarily because of a DOS attack. Specifically, the domain, ALJAZEERA.NET, is currently pointed to the mydomain service and causing service problems.

The forwarding pool which usually has an average of 600 connection setups/second this time of the day shot to over 8,000 connection setups per second. As more and more people discovered the new Ip the connections continued to climb. Our A records have 30 minute TTL's and we have propagated a new zone with null values for the problem domain. We will lift our ACL's as soon as we can.

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People Will Believe Anything, 2

I’m going to try to stay out of trouble today, after yesterday’s fiasco of pointing to an extremely inaccurate and anti-semitic conspiracy page.

I have always found the Urban Legends section of about.com (formerly The Mining Company) immensely entertaining. It’s also extremely useful in debunking the ever-present hoax virus warnings and too-good-to-be-true “Forward This to Everyone on Your List” e-mails.

Why are anti-NWO conspiracy theorists typically anti-semitic?

This may fall under the unanswerable questions category, like “Why did The Man in the High Castle win a Hugo award?” but ki pointed out that many global conspiracy theorists and their organizations are strongly anti-semitic. This makes little sense to me, as this future New World Order is, according to Scripture, going to be anti-semitic itself—attempting (and failing) to destroy Israel. Ki suggested that I am looking for logic and reason where none exist.

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The Tigers Pounce

Today our MLS listing expired—We know this because the phone calls from other realtors have started coming in, asking if we want to list with them. One realtor even came to the house fairly early this morning!

We have decided to let our current contract with our realtor expire (it ends at the end of this month), and re-list the house in a couple of months after we finish some cosmetics/minor repairs.

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Why does the weekend end so quickly?

Quite a bit going on this weekend. The primary task was to get a project for CenterWatch finished, including using a combination of MS Word's Table of Contents feature and some Excel formulae to generate an index of Companies by Therapeutic Specialty. I discovered a goof on my part; I needed to have one specific named style for the therapeutic specialties on each page, but not use that style for anything else on the page. Every time I would do a search-and-replace to fix this, Word would crash. Finally I gave up, created a second copy of the file, and deleted everything but the therapeutic specialties that was in the style I was trying to index. The section was, of course, 350 pages long! I'm making a list of notes for next year.

We had some good family time for a change (with Nichelle sick/me overworked for the past couple of months). We watched the newly remastered Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang, which should have been in Widescreen, but has not been issued that way (except for the opening race scene and credits and closing credits). The sound and picture quality are superb, and the DVD features a cool “sing along” feature for the musical numbers. I need to start a Web petition going about the widescreen/pan-and-scan issue … I’ve e-mailed MGM’s customer support several times, but not once received an answer.

Sunday afternoon we watched the new Veggie Tales Jonah film. I should add that Nichelle and I both fell asleep partway through. The kids liked it. Big Idea did a good job of explaining what the job of an Old Testament prophet was. David, after his class on Sunday night, presented me with his coloring sheet of the 10 Commandments, and said, “This is a message from the Lord.”

Sunday night I jumped over to Shine! to make a quick edit (remarking out a live performance that had past). When I went to check my work, I discovered that the site had been defaced by some juvenile crackers with an obscene anti-war message. Apparent Interland had a little security problem sometime early Saturday morning. Other evidence indicates their mail server was commandeered as well. Just what John Harris needs—his site defaced on a day when people were likely to be visiting the site to get directions to the performance Saturday evening.

The war news was negative for the first time so far. We have six people from our church on active military duty, plus another moved-away friend (he started riding our bus to church when he was in fourth grade—right now his neice is in Nichelle’s and my 4th grade Sunday school class.