Author Archives: brad

Iraqis’ 10 tips to beat blackout heat: Without power — and hence without air conditioning — Iraqis have taken to climbing up stairs in the hot nights. Some install metal bed frames on rooftops, while others simply stretch out on thin mattresses. More gems await. Just click.

RBGarage is back up! Woohoo!

I suppose I need a haircut, although there’s no longer much hair to speak of. Last night, at dinner, Grace looked at me and said, “Daddy, you have baby hair.”

I thought she meant that all the hairs on my head were short, but as it turns out, she thinks I look like a baby with hair like this.

Baby hair.

This is the time of year when those of us in educational technology start to feel like the Dunkin’ Donuts guy: “Time to clone the iBooks…”

We well over 200 laptop computers in our offices right now. We need to update them and return them by Monday. Fun stuff.

In the meantime, I have about 30 brand new iBooks that need to be cloned and, by implication, 30 users that need training on Mac OS X (which is a fun training; I love it).

If updates are spotty over the next week or so, it’s just because it’s time to clone the iBooks.

It’s an eye-opening experience to walk into my four-year-old daughter’s bedroom to find her sitting at her big yellow plastic desk with her head in her hands, lamenting the amount of work she has to do.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, when I find her sitting there looking dejected.

“Daddy,” she says sadly. “I just have so much work to do. I just don’t know how I’m going to get it all done.”

Granted, her “work” consists mostly of cutting random shapes out of construction paper and drawing objects on them. Even so, it gave me a pretty clear glimpse of how she sees me, or at least the image I’m projecting at home.

So, tonight, the three of us went to see Steven Courtney in concert at a local church. He was great. We had a rather humbling experience afterward. Instead of charging admission, the church collected a love offering, giving people an opportunity to support Steven Courtney directly with what they feel is an appropriate amount (sidebar: we used to do this for some gigs in Anonymous Joe, and you never know just how much or little a love offering will bring in; if you want predictability, put it in your rider). We put $11 in the pot, because that’s the all cash we had on us.

This, while rather sad, seeing as how I make a pretty decent living and have in the past month bought a new car and a PowerBook for my wife, yet I rarely have two nickels to rub together, is not the humbling part. On the way, we passed his merchandise table. Grace wanted a video. Jen said, “Sorry, but Mommy and Daddy don’t have any money.” This was true; all of our cash, all $11 of it, went into the love offering.

Now, understand that this is not the church we attend. We were virtual strangers here. Also understand that we’re not particularly dressed up for the occasion. A kind woman must have overheard Jen telling Grace that we didn’t have any money and misunderstood. She turned to us, “Does she want a video?” she asked.

Jen, not really understanding yet what was happening, said, “Yeah, but we don’t have enough money.”

“I can buy her one,” the woman said. “I’m writing a check anyway, so we can just throw it in.”

At this point, I realized that this kind soul thought we were hurting for money, which we definitely aren’t, we just never have any cash on hand. We’re credit people. We politely declined, but it struck me how gracious this woman was. She didn’t know us, had never seen us, but within two seconds of learning (even mistakenly) that we were in need, she offered to help.

Wow. I wish I were more like that.

From LAM Systems. Running great so far.

Yet, whenever I see Microsoft’s stupid “bliss” wallpaper, I expect the computer’s shutdown sound to be “Time for Teletubby Bye-Bye!”

I was looking for a bug-tracking application the other night (yes, I write that many bugs into my programs that I need another program to keep them straight) andfound phpBugTracker. Very slick, PHP-based, and even works with PostgreSQL, which automatically earns brownie points with me (too many PHP coders/scripters think that mySQL is the only open source database in the world).

I looked at BugZilla, but I think that’s a bit heavyweight for my needs.

This looks very interesting.

How to Write Unmaintainable Code: Make sure that every method does a little bit more (or less) than its name suggests. As a simple example, a method named isValid(x) should as a side effect convert x to binary and store the result in a database. You know, my code’s pretty unmaintainable already. And that’s with no effort on my part!

U.S. OKs Hormone for Short Kids (via Wired News). This seems suspiciously like standing at the top of a very slippery slope.

Pavement Terror: sick, but in a funny kind of way.

How to recognize a weblog tool by its permalinks, from Matthew Thomas.

One of the first games I ever played on a Mac is now freeware. With the shutdown of Casady & Greene, sovaldi sale John Calhoun has re-released Glider Pro for free. Yeeha!

Dooce on bad PowerPoint: You’ve managed to breathe life into the Joan Rivers of business documents: an impenetrable fortress of mismatched forms and nonsense, wailing, screeching, unbearable to witness and unwilling to die.