As many of you (all three of my readers) probably know, I’ve been in the market for a new/used truck. I’ve been doing a lot of research and have settled on a very specific model. So this past Sunday I went to test drive one. They had the short bed version in stock, but not the long bed. I figured the ride wouldn’t be a whole lot different, so I took it out for a spin. I was rather pleased. It has a stiff ride, which is to be expected as it is a truck, but at highway speeds of 65mph or more, it was a quiet, smooth ride. The dealership would have to order one for me if I wanted it in the green they have (Gail thinks red is too flashy, I detest silver, so green is a nice compromise). The Cash for Clunkers rebates kick in on the 24th, which means I’ll have to purchase a brand new truck if I want to take advantage of the rebates. I’ll have to seriously massage some numbers to see if I can get it in the price range I want. And that’s the part I hate. I like test driving, I like searching tons of car sites, reading Auto Trader, and walking car lots. I hate the negotiation part. That’s part of why Carmax appeals to me – no hassle pricing. If the Carmax dealer by me sold new Toyotas instead of Mitsubishis, it’d make life much easier.
Aside from that, we had a busy weekend. Gail and I took the kids to see the new Harry Potter movie, which we all thought was excellent. Looking forward to seeing last movie. I think the movies themselves have just gotten better as they go along, which makes sense; the kids are better actors, they’re growing up and filling out their roles.
After the movie, Gail asked if I wanted to go to the Apple store, as it was in the same mall as the theater. I said “I can’t go in, I’ll have to buy something. I can only go in there so often and come out empty handed!” She said “So...let’s go.”
I took that as permission.
We went, and man was that place crowded. Gail remarked that you couldn’t tell there was a recession going on judging by the crowd in there. She was right. Wall-to-wall people. Gail found the iPhones and started playing, and then watched a guy who was giving a class on the iPhone. She has been wanting one almost as much as I have. I leaned over and said “If you go and ask if they have the 3Gs in stock, I’ll buy you one.” I don’t think I’d finished expelling breath from that sentence before she was gone from my side. Five minutes later, Sarah came up and said, “Mom’s looking for you.” Gail was at one of the laptops, and was half-way through the process of upgrading to the iPhone. She looked at me quizzically, to see if I really meant it. She’d filled out all but the last four digits of my social security code on the upgrade form. I punched those in, and hit next.
We got in line, and about 20 mins later we were walking out of the store with her new iPhone. She was very happy, and for those that are wondering why I didn’t buy the iPhone for myself, as much as I’ve been talking about it lately, well – her smiles are always worth it. And her phone was starting to go into the crapper anyway. I’ll get one soon, and it’ll be easier to justify it now as well. See, aside from the cheese-factor of making my wife happy, there was also a bit of psychology behind it; Gail played with her phone all weekend, loving how easy it was, how she was able to navigate to the app store and download stuff (great example of that in a moment), and just the general overall coolness of it. When I start complaining how my phone sucks, or I’m jealous, she won’t hesitate to drag me over to the Apple store and get one. Hopefully.
Sunday Gail and I got up to go walking along the W&OD Trail. We had walked all of about 30 yards down the trail when Gail said “oh, we should get my phone! It has a pedometer application!” We had left it in the car as she had no pockets and I didn’t want to be stuck carrying it. So we turned around and got her phone out of the car. When she said the phone had a pedometer application, I thought she meant already installed. Nope – but she knew the App Store had one, and even thought to look for a free one (which she found). And that’s part of the beauty of the iPhone, and Apple products in general; ease of use. Gail’s by no means a super computer user, but she had figured out how to get the iPhone to hook to the App Store and search for a application and download it. It took all of about 30 seconds, and then we were on our way, her phone sitting in my pocket counting our steps. Pretty damn cool. And I was surprised by the lightness, it didn’t feel heavy in my pocket at all.
Finished up the weekend by wiping Gail’s laptop and re-installing Vista. One way or another it managed to get a bunch of trojans and virii on it. Frustrating when the programs I tried (Spy Doctor, Norton, McAffee) couldn’t get rid of it. I figured it was due, so I told Gail the previous week to back up what she wanted, and last night I started the wiping process. I started by muttering how I wouldn’t have had to do this with an iMac (referring to my idiotic purchase of the Sony Vaio instead of an iMac) and Gail said, “Want to go to the Apple Store?”
For a change it felt like I had a somewhat productive weekend. I managed to get a site I’d been working on for awhile up and running. The people I was building it for seemed happy, so that’s cool. Went to a winery on Saturday night and watched Third Stream Giants, a funky band from Fredericksburg. Gail and her mom (who has been visiting since Tuesday) sampled the wine and declared it ‘crappy’, but we had fun regardless.
Sunday they decided to take the kids to an all-you-can-eat ice-cream festival. Figuring I didn’t need to be party to such debauchery (as I would probably partake to a degree that would leave the sponsors of the event wondering what they were thinking in having an all-you-can-eat event), I hopped on the Harley and went down through the countryside towards Culpepper. Ended up putting about 125 miles on the odometer. It was a great day for a ride and I enjoyed the heck out of it. I have the ‘biker’s tan’ now: white hands (from the gloves), burnt forearm, and white biceps. Gonna look like a barber pole at the end of the summer.
With the one website out of the way, I’m going to try and keep the momentum going and finish my writing critique site. My friend Treva said she’d help, as she has more experience with Drupal than I, so here’s to hoping we can actually accomplish something. I don’t have a layout, but I want to get the back end working properly and site flow to make sense before throwing it into a layout. That’s probably doing it ass-backwards, but I’ve never been accused of making sense to begin with.
It’s entirely too nice to be sitting inside, in my drab corporate cube, staring at this screen.
July has been odd. Yesterday the temps were only in the upper 70s and the humidity has been very tolerable. Today we’re in the low to mid 80s. I should be on my bike heading west, into the twisty curves of the some nice roads along the Appalachians, or down into West Virginia. It’s simply gorgeous outside.
My poor dog Annie has been having a hell of a skin infection/rash lately. Since March she’s been scratching. I literally mean that. Since March it seems like all she does is scratch. And lick. And scratch and lick and scratch and lick and oh my god I’m ready to go insane. She’s usually worn out by about 10:30 and we get some sleep. But about 5am she starts up again with the scratching, and by now she’s snuck into our bedroom and is scratching (or licking) right at the foot of our bed. Some nights she is scratching so vigorously she shakes the entire bed, waking us up in the process. On a good morning Gail isn’t the most pleasant, add being forcibly awaken in such a manner and she’s just grouchy as hell. At about 5:30 this morning she threw the covers off and stormed out of the bedroom muttering something I’m sure was vulgar and probably involved some sort of evil way to get rid of the dog. Poor Annie, it’s not like it’s her fault. I’ve been trying to remember that when she won’t stop and it’s frustrating me. We’ve spent a ton of money at the vet so far and right now she’s eating kangaroo dogfood to try and get her on a different protein. We’ve done the steroid shots and sprays, baths galore, even aloe vera and coconut oil. Hopefully we find something that works soon.
Gail’s mother is coming into town tomorrow and so this past weekend, rather than cruising around on the motorcycle, was spent cleaning and finishing up projects that’d been sitting around. The hallway is painted, along with Sarah’s room. It was 3/5ths done, and we finally got the other two walls painted the purple she picked out. It really is quite cool. Dark, but cool. I also replaced toilet seats, intake vents and put new outlets in Sarah’s room, replacing the old ones. The previous owners just took the paint roller and went over the socket and faceplate in one swoop. Now it’s nice and white instead of that mauve they had. There was power washing, floor scrubbing, kitchen scrubbing (including the top of the refrigerator), dusting, vacuuming. I imagine tonight will involve some steam cleaning. Wee.
I’ve been looking at trucks lately. It seems the one I want – a Toyota Tacoma Double Cab Long Bed 4×4 in something other than silver – is difficult to come by. At least for the price I want. I can go to buyatoyota.com and build my own to the tune of 30K, but that’s out of my price range. Gail and I stopped by Carmax yesterday and they had one that was almost exactly what I wanted on the lot: 4×4, double cab, red… but the short box. If I get a truck, I want to be able to lie down in the back and close the tailgate. Can’t do that when the bed is all of 5′6″. I guess I’ll keep looking. Maybe if I save a bit more and take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers government program, I can get a new one. I’ve never had a new car before. I know people say you lose a good chunk of the value of the car as soon as you drive it off the lot, but that’s OK. I tend to drive my cars into the ground, putting 100K or more in miles on it, so it makes sense to get a new one. At least to me.
Let’s see... what else can I babble about? Cody’s in summer school again, for failing biology. He’ll probably get an A in the class. He’s not dumb, he’s just lazy. Guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in that case. Because of the F he can’t go see the Green Day concert which we bought him tickets to, as sort of a bribe (pass the class and you can go!). He didn’t, so Sarah and I will probably go, and sell (or give away) the other two tickets. In August my friend Scott and I are going to go see Silversun Pickups, which is just about my favorite band right now. They have a Sonic Youth/90s sound that I really like. That’s it for shows I believe.
As I alluded to in the previous post, Sarah had her All-Star soccer tournament this weekend. Out of three games, her team lost two. Which isn’t all that surprising considering they’ve had about four practices together. Individually they might be good, but soccer is a team sport and you can’t gel as a team with only four practices. But this morning’s game (the third one) the team played well. They won 2-0 and Sarah scored one of those goals.
But I digress in what I really wanted to talk about.
I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a grammar Nazi. Not that I’m perfect; I’ve made stupid mistakes as I’m sure many of you have, and I’d be completely unsurprised if there weren’t a couple in this post (double negative!). But I have a healthy respect for the language, and it drives me insane when I see ‘your’ or ‘there’ instead of ‘you’re’ or ‘their’. And it’s scary because I’m seeing college-aged kids who don’t seem to know the difference as well.
There’s another word that’s been driving me nuts in the way it’s being used lately, especially now that I coach soccer; the word is ‘verses’. The girls all seem to think that saying “who are we versing today” is acceptable. I’m constantly correcting them. And it was really driven home when I overheard one of the other parents ask the All-Star coach who the team was ‘versing’. The way she said it sounded almost mocking, as if she was fully aware that she was using it completely wrong (and I really hope she was). But how long before she stops mocking herself and using it naturally? I understand language is fluid and dynamic and is constantly evolving, but this is driving me up the wall.
Since my last post describing how I was getting into Drupal, I’ve worked on it a total of once. Not exactly going to get me closer to my goal of figuring out how it all comes together. This seems to be the way I operate; I get excited about something, I start working on it, I build a few pages, get a very low-level basic knowledge of whatever it is I’m working on, and then I let it go idle for a period of time. I’m trying to overcome that, but not having a lot of success at the moment. Too many other distractions.
One of those distractions is back – soccer season has swung into full gear. Our team had its first game of the season this past Saturday, which we won, 1-0. It was a great game, and we had some great plays by our keeper. After the whistle blew sounding the end of the game, we were all giving each other high-fives and congratulations and lining up to go shake the other teams’ hands when I noticed Sarah was in tears. I asked what was wrong and she said she couldn’t breathe. Turns out she’d been trying to get my attention the last part of the game because she needed a break and was having a hard time catching her breath. I asked why she didn’t just run over and tell me or the other coach that she needed to come out and she replied with “I was worried the ball would come my way and get past me and they’d score.”
Talk about making dad feel like a heel!
After being able to rest for about 10 minutes, she was back to her normal bouncy self and was happy they’d won. It didn’t seem like asthma or anything, she was just wiped out.
The rest of the weekend was spent doing the normal weekend-suburbanite chores. I did manage to wipe out the front page of a website I’d been working on. That was lots of fun. Thankfully because I had the page still loaded in a browser, I was able to create it with minimal fuss and had it back online within 20 mins. Hopefully the owner of the page didn’t notice.
And hopefully this will make me start doing backups more often!
I’ve been working on a new site, and I decided to build it using Drupal. Many (OK, none) of you know I’m a big fan of Expression Engine, and are probably wondering why I’ve decided to torture myself with a new CMS. I have a few reasons:
It’s FREE as in beer (ExpressionEngine costs $99 for a personal license)
It supports members
I like learning new things
It seems to have a strong developer and user community behind it
Never hurts to have ‘experience developing with Drupal’ on a resume
It’s been a long, slow learning curve. I should throw steep in there as well. I’m sure like Expression Engine, I’ll have an ‘a-ha!’ moment or two. The problem I’ve had lately is trying to sit down for a quite hour or three and dig into it.
I had some time last night so I was playing around with it. If you’re new to Drupal, one of the first modules I suggest installing is CCK (Content Construction Kit). This module allows you to insert fields of any type where you want them. I’m creating a site for writers, which will allow them to post short stories for review. Rather than a typical Title field and Body field, I wanted a place for a summary. This is where the CCK module comes in. Now when someone submits a story, they have three fields: The Title of Your Story, Summary and Your Story. I will probably change these fields to sound better, but you get the idea the flexibility the CCK module gives. There’s so much to this module that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of it.
Otherwise, it’s been trial and error, trial and breaking, breaking and fixing, getting frustrated and giving up, and then having a thought and going back to it. It’s a long process, but I’m starting to feel like I’m making a bit of headway. Once I have the fields in place, and the comments working, then it’ll be putting it into a layout I want. And THAT will be a serious challenge.
It will be during the dog days of summer that I’ll recall mornings like today’s with fondness. As I sit there on my motorcycle, stuck in traffic with all that metal of the cars reflecting the hot, overbearing sun onto me from all directions, the heat rising from the asphalt, the engine idling between my legs cooking my jeans. As I struggle through traffic to try and get some speed up to create a breeze to cool my sweat-beaded brow, as I feel the sweat drip down along my spine to the small of my back. That’s when I’ll recall wistfully of the rides taken in March, when I was snug in my leathers, my head encased in my full-face helmet and the temperature brisk. Mornings where you felt happy to be alive.
But this morning, as I traveled down the road and the fog grew increasingly thicker, I was being anything but wistful about the ride. The weather reports were promising a beautiful afternoon with highs near 70, blue skies and a slight breeze. Completely perfect riding weather. As it’s been a nearly two months since I had been out on the bike, I figured it’d be a great day to ride to work. It was a great day to ride HOME from work, but certainly not to.
When I got on the 6-lane that I take to work, the already thick fog grew even thicker, and I couldn’t see twenty yards in front of my bike. Combine that with the condensation that was collecting rapidly on my face shield and the traffic coming up quickly behind me and probably not seeing my puny tail light, I decided it was time to get off the road. I pulled off at the next exit, and found a Chik-fil-a for some breakfast. I couldn’t even see the buildings across the parking lot, so I figured I’d stay until I could. Luckily I had a book of short stories in my saddle bag, so I had quite the pleasant morning sitting and reading.
I do love foggy mornings. Just not so much when I’m riding in them.
Along with iTunes 5 and the new iPod Nano, Apple has also recently released (Actually, I don't know when this came out, I just found it today) a limited edition Harry Potter iPod. It comes engraved with the Hogwarts Crest, as well as all 6 books.
Would I be showing how much of a geek/nerd I am if I said I really really really wanted the Harry Potter iPod? My birthday is in December, for those that care :: bats eyelashes ::
It's been awhile..seems if my personal site is down, I can't write here. Go figure...
Anyways, many of you may have heard about the Supreme Court's decision to allow personal property seizures for private economic development. Well, apparently a private developer is seeking to put this new law into effect by petitioning the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, NH, seeking to start the application process to build a hotel at 34 Cilley Hill Road.
Which is were current Supreme Court Justice David Souter lives. Ironic that the Honorable David Souter voted for this as well.
My brother has a mac at his desk at work, and has been getting acclimated to it, slowly but surely. Take this conversation for instance...
Shad (AIM): Doh...I hate the fact that Apple-Tab and Apple-Q are right next to each other... status Seth disconnected status Seth connected Seth (AIM): well now I know what Apple-Q does...
For those that don't know (or can't guess...) Apple-Q quits the program you are currently in (akin to alt-F4 for windows)