This Day In History: 06/30
It's been a pretty busy week. I went indoor rock climbing on Saturday for the first time and utterly destroyed all my muscles. Sunday afternoon was spent at the pool. I also picked up a copy of the fifth Harry Potter book on Saturday and finished it today. It was a decent story but parts were definitely bloated and repetitive. The story moved quickly despite that though, and I think I liked this one better than the fourth one. If you're illiterate or long on free-time, you can also get the entire unabridged audio book on 23 CDs.
The expansion for Warcraft III is in stores starting tomorrow.
Here's an excerpt from a technical manual I was reading last week. You know you have no business writing manuals when you cut this gem:
Five minutes after 9/11
Naked with axes
Al Qaeda joke shot down
I watched Secret Window with Johnny Depp this weekend. It was definitely worth a rental, and doesn't show all its cards right away. Check it out.
I taught a class yesterday on Java operators as part of the Java Certification series going on at work. It seemed to go over pretty well. I'll be teaching another one in August as well.
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I finally got off my ass and rewrote the PHP Comments script to show viewers how many comments are written for any given news update, something that Blogger and other blog software has had for years. Kathy and others have said that they never click on the link because they don't want to see an empty page, so hopefully this will inspire a new age of collective arguing. This is an upgrade I've been putting off since comments were introduced in April 2003, but it actually only took about an hour of coding in the end. I'm not a big fan of PHP but I guess it gets the job done.
I recently decided to shift the focus of these updates slightly. This site has been a "Dear Diary, this is what I did today" site since I first started daily updates upon my move to Florida in 2001, punctured by darts of rare insight when the spirit moved me. Now that I've been a working man for two years, "what I did today" is generally pretty boring, so I've resolved to spend more time on my thoughts & opinions. To this end, I have a notebook to jot down possible news ideas as they come to me. To date, this notebook has not been instrumental in the new style of my updates, because it spent the last four days sitting on my desk (it's too big to carry around anywhere). Currently, the only thing written in it is "Buy a smaller notebook".
This site will still remain angst-free however. Even when it feels good to be an angster, I will keep things light-hearted. There are plenty of other web logs in the world dedicated to hating life, writing bad angstful poetry, or driving the angstmobile down Interstate Angst, and they all do it better than I could, so I'll stick with my award-winning formula of flippancy (patent pending).
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because June is so last month
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![]() "Nope, I'm not up to anything in particular." | ![]() "Dude... you're high." |
![]() Video Game Night is a success | ![]() Rebecca is tricked into making her own birthday cake at a surprise party |
![]() This was the tiny elephant. | ![]() Caught in a tiger trap. |
![]() Ella's favourite part of the zoo was the puddles. | ![]() Saturday Trip to the Zoo |
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I've added this month's new photos to my Picasa album. Congratulations on surviving for the first half of 2010 without bankruptcy, kidney failure, or severe disfigurement! May the second half be just as magical.
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It was yesterday morning when I was making a legal right turn on red (with no pedestrians present) that I was furiously honked at by a driver in a bright red Mustang. He was driving in the far lane of the two-lane road (Beauregard Street) I had turned onto, and was apparently so agitated that I had come within five and a half feet of marring his finish that he had a musical seizure, belting out some sort of angry Morse code on his horn for the next fifty yards. Evidently, he worked just a few blocks up the road, and as he pulled into his turn lane, he held some sort of law enforcement badge out his window (mounted on a square of black felt that was obviously too big for wallet-size) and gave me his best glare.
I assume that I was supposed to be intimidated by the consequences of driving responsibly next to someone who wasn't a cop but had a badge like one, but his playing of the badge card just made the whole scenario comical. This is probably the only situation in life where it would actually be fun to own a trained monkey, because the threat of being covered in poop or having a baby eaten would be greatly outweighed by the hilarity of getting it to snatch the badge as I drove past (although "drive-by snatch" is another concept that probably sounds better on paper). Afterwards, I could film an FX serial about a monkey that solves crimes.
The reason I was on Beauregard Street yesterday was for my first conference experience in my new role, held at the Hilton Mark Center just upstairs from the American Scientific Glassblowers Society symposium. It was kind of on the small side from my expectations, with about 55 attendees, and the presentations were generally pitched to a management level rather than a technical one -- in the last presentation of the day, the speaker skipped over a slide full of small print with a dismissive "oh, this slide's too technical".
Still, the material being presented was good, even if three of the eight speakers (including the keynote) were last minute replacements -- it connected the dots between my old role and my new one while constantly referencing the Object Management Group (OMG!) and supporting a game of word bingo with phrases like "policy", "swim lanes" and "Federal, State, Local, Tribal".
I also bumped into a guy I went to high school with, who happened to be one of the prime speakers, and whose CV shows that he's done more in the last two months than I have in my entire life. He was the one sweeping the high school science fairs with cures for cancer and rapidly incrementing atomic numbers while everyone else was making volcanoes and plugging things into potatoes.
The conference was well catered, from the breakfast burritos to the steak and salmon entrees served at awkward circular tables where complete strangers played the D.C. game of "So what do you do?" until common ground for conversation could be found. It adjourned at 3 PM with ice cream sandwiches, in plenty of time to flee the city before those pesky HOV restrictions went into effect.
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New photos have been added to the Life, 2014 album.
June's Final Grade: A, thumbs up for June!
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New photos have been added to the Life, 2015 album, although they are mostly shed-related.
June's Final Grade: B-, Fun punctuated the month like exclamation points, but a fairly poor work-to-life balance dampened the weekends.
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New photos have been added to the Life, 2016 album.
June's Final Grade: B+, nice weather, nice people, and minimal responsibilities.
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New photos have been added to the Life, 2017 album. Google Photos sucks.
June's Final Grade: B+, a lot going on and many visits with local friends, but a lot of waiting towards the end!
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New photos have been added to the Life, 2021 album.
June's Final Grade: B, it was better last month when I was off work
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