General

Tried this Indian place in Vernon. Check out my little mini-review on UrbanSpoon.

The sand pile achieves completion. Good stuff.

This is as close as they’d let me get. The room was absolutely packed.

He’s the little white dot left of center.

And the place is completely crawling with secret service.

They had a bunch of guys making the biggest sand castle I’ve ever seen. Pretty cool!

My very first trade show that I actually get to attend, and work the booth, and shmooze. Some of the booths are extremely fancy.

Others, not so much.

And some of them are just completely insane.

There was one booth that was just a giant pile of sand. I didn’t quite get it.

Monday at 11:30 I get to see the keynote, by everyone’s favorite non-economy ruining president, Bill Clinton. Good times.

Surprisingly easy to find..

Simply load your trunk with fresh cut pine logs, park your car at the airport in the middle of july for a week, and go pick it up. Your car will have the most amazing fresh pine scent imaginable.

We had a pretty big tag sale last weekend. And as tag sales go, this one was pretty successful. I define success as “No crap went back into my house”. Most of it sold, some of it went to goodwill. As I was going through boxes, I found some old negatives from pictures I took way back in college. Every few years I stumble onto them, and every few years I just put them back and ignore them.

For whatever reason, call it nostalgia, or boredom, I decided I needed to get them into a non-perishable format. I found this website that would do the job for 130 bucks (about 40 cents a print). That seemed reasonable, given the volume of pictures (I have no idea what reasonable is). So the other day I’m at the local CVS, and the little kid working the photo booth is sort of staring at me, so I’m like “dude, how much to get like 400 pictures on old-school negatives put onto a cd?” and the little kid is like “I dunno, like maybe 10 bucks?”

10 bucks later, here they are, in all their glory.

Enjoy!

College Pictures

The first balloon.

Lots of hair starting to grow in. We can even use hair clips now!

Just happy to be in front of a camera.

At tina’s graduation party, trying on daddy’s hat.

Nothing on earth is better than a big pile of stuffed animals.

For whatever reason, this is the best game in the world. Nothing beats the babble game.

Today was 85, sunny, humid.. a perfect first day to try swimming. The pools here are all heated, which makes it double perfect.

Getting ready to put the swimsuit on

No surprises here, she really liked it.

After mastering swimming, we wanted to see if she could try walking. Not bad, for a first attempt!

My first choice of costume for the baby was Master Blaster from Beyond Thunderdome.

My choice was of course discarded in favor of “happy caterpillar”.

She really hated this costume, and except for maybe 5 minutes, screamed when the little caterpillar hat was on her head.

More pics here..

I’m not sure they still make you do this, but back when I was in high school if you wanted to more easily get into college, they tried to make you take a foreign language. So I picked German. I don’t know why I did that. Spanish or Latin seems more useful. But I just HAD to pick German. Not only did I struggle in it, but it completely wrecked my ability to write in English. Why? It’s a little known fact that German is the only language in the world that requires you to capitalize all nouns.

To this day, by default, I always capitalize all my nouns, no matter what language I’m writing in (mostly English, but I do it in computer languages too). I don’t know why I allowed the noun capitalization meme to infect my brain, but it’s there, like a song that’s been stuck in my head for the last 15 years. I can’t stop. Today I wrote up a fairly wordy piece of documentation, only to realize at the very end that I forgot about my noun problem, and every noun was capitalized. Search and replace can only fix things to a point. I sometimes wonder how many hundreds of hours I could have reclaimed if I never took that stupid foreign language.

I should also mention that the only opportunity I’ve ever had to use my German was at Lake Como in Italy, which borders Switzerland. There was one waiter who tried talking to me in a language that sort of sounded like a dialect of German, but his speech was impenetrable. That was my one big chance, and I choked.

3 years of foreign language classes down the toilet.

Your tongues can’t repel flavor of that magnitude..

Tonite we watched “The Queen”, starring Helen Mirren, and some actor that looks exactly like an evil Tony Blair doppleganger. So about half way through the movie, Karen asks “So I don’t get this. What’s the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom?”

And I reply, “Well, EVERYONE knows that it’s all exactly the same thing. I think. Errrrr… Actually, you know what, I really have no idea what any of those things really mean.”

Thank god for wikipedia! They put together a nice little euler diagram that explains everything

I don’t think anyone on earth actually knows all this. I’ve always used them interchangeably. And what the heck is the “Isle of Man?” Is that where the centaurs and dragons live?

Imagine a scenario where you want someone to build a deck for you (no, not this deck)

I mean the other kind of deck. The one made of wood that you have to paint.

So you want to build a deck. So you hire a contractor, and tell him “I want you to make me a deck. I want it made out of wood, and I want it to be nice. You can decide what color to paint it.” And that’s all you tell the contractor, and he goes off to work. A week later, he finishes the job, and you look at it, and decide “you know, I really don’t like this deck. The color is wrong, and it needs more benches. And I expect my changes done in 2 days at no additional cost to me”. And the contractor says, “Ok, but you never told me what color you wanted in the first place. What color do you want?” and you respond “Oh, I don’t know. I need to see it completely painted before I can decide which color is right”.

Sounds insane, right? This is the insanity of software development. I’m in this cycle right now, currently in it’s 4th iteration. And this customer, who is actually a pretty good customer, can’t seem to nail down exactly what they want, and it’s costing us a lot of time and money. They just want changes, and once the changes are complete and put into production, they’ll decide if they like it or not. And they think this is fine, and natural, and normal. This, of course, is not the first time this has happened in my career, this is just the most frustrating.
I’m just glad I don’t have to build decks for these folks.

This weekend, I decided to change the oil and oil filter in my lawn tractor. John Deere actually makes this process EXTREMELY easy, in fact, you don’t even need tools to do it. So I drain all the oil out, no problem. And the instructions say to just twist off the oil filter with your bare hands. I’m not sure what animal they hired at the John Deere plant to screw on oil filters, but that f*cking thing wouldn’t budge. So I get my pipe wrench, and try to twist it off, and in the process I bust up my middle finger, and I get this really deep gash on the top of my ring finger, right below the nail. Extremely painful place to get a cut, let me tell you.

In the end, all I had to do is put on a pair of latex gloves (for grip), and the thing eventually did come off. But man alive, what a pain.

Process? Simple. Implementing the process? HARD.

After 2 weeks, Andrew was finally discharged from Hartford Hospital this morning. He had a translateral mega something something, I don’t know, they opened up his chest, took out some ribs, and replaced some major plumbing, and it SUCKED BALLS.
Here’s some pictures of him in the hospital:

You KNOW you want to see them… 

Here’s braedan, born 10:30 yesterday, 7 pounds.

And here’s Elijah (Eli), exact same time, 6 pounds.

Everyone is healthy and well!

Today at starbucks I was posed the question,

“Did you want that without whip cream?”

I responded

“No, whip cream”.

The girl heard “No whip cream” (without the comma)
So I got no whip cream. But I didn’t want not whipped cream, I wanted whip cream.

Obviously when I added that little upswing phoneme at the end of “no”, it means I was negating her statement, not my desire for whip cream.
I think next time I’m asked that question, I’m going to simply respond.

“Want.”

We had a massive amount of rain last night. This morning, I get this in my backyard:

From Lake Nate

From Lake Nate

From Lake Nate

I’m now the proud owner of an entire lake! It’s pretty big, but it’s not that close to my house, so it’s not a direct threat. But, it’s right near (and maybe on top of) my septic tank’s leaching field.

So to all you master dirtologists out there, I pose the following questions:

1) This section of lawn can usually absorb water pretty quickly. Is this caused by the ground being frozen, or is ice sitting on top of the lawn stopping it from draining?

2) If this is on or near my leaching field, should I worry about my septic tank overflowing back into the house?

3) Should I try to pump Lake Nate down? The water is awful slushy, so I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Or, plan B, wait till it freezes over and go ice skating.