Category Archives: uncategorized

Ah, yes. Welcome to Gateway country. This story made me laugh out loud. My friends and I were outraged that the guy was arrested. My dad was really pissed about it.

Behind the Slashdot Phenomenon. Interesting interview with Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, of Slashdot fame. Every time I read what Malda has to say, I marvel out how lucky the guy is. Not to say that the code behind Slashdot isn’t cool, but this guy was in the right place at the right time in a big way.

It’s been an interesting week since my last updates. Of course, I spent a good chunk of today implementing the Blogger API in REALbasic, which is why I have all those “Hey, it works!” posts from earlier today. XML-RPC is awesome technology.

Last Wednesday, Jen’s grandfather passed away. We saw him on Father’s Day, and he seemed quiet, but we had no idea how sick he really was. He went to work on Wednesday morning and at some point put his head down on his arms and fell asleep at his desk. He never woke up. The funeral was Saturday, but it took a while to get to that.

Today is my 8th anniversary with Jen, and we went away to the Inn of the Dove in Harrisburg on Thursday and Friday night. We had reservations we couldn’t cancel, but we didn’t want to miss the viewing on Friday night. Jen’s grandmother firmly told us not to cancel our plans, but to go ahead, so we did. But on Thursday afternoon, my lawn suddenly got covered with sewage. Jen’s dad said that he would take care of it, and not to cancel our plans.

So on Friday, which is also his birthday, Jen’s dad spent most of the day fixing my plumbing and dealing with his father’s death.

We had a really good time at the Inn of the Dove, though.

We finally got the finishing touches to the plumbing done Saturday night, but not before I grabbed a piece of VERY HOT copper and burned the crap out of my right hand.

Here’s hoping that my next post will be done with my new Blogger app. Next step after that: Manila RPC so that my teachers can upate their Manila sites really easily. Should be very cool.

Yeeha! It works!!

I’m testing a new XML-RPC implementation in REALbasic (still running in the IDE!). Let’s see if this gets posted.

Tonight I changed a preference that I haven’t touched since 1999. I made Mozilla my default web browser and bumped Internet Explorer. I still like IE, but the news surrounding the 5.2 update for Mac OS X was pretty lukewarm. I don’t want it to set my homepage to MSN — I like a blank home page. I don’t want to have quit my running apps to install a browser — Mozilla was drag and drop. IE continues to clutter up my screen with popunders and popups — Mozilla can turn that off for me. Plus, Mozilla does tabbed browsing, which I’m really getting into (clean interface) and it will save groups of bookmarks to open together in a tab set. IE can’t do that. My only complaints about Mozilla:
1) The interface is not quite Aqua
2) It’s a bit slower than IE for casual browsing (but I hear that it’s faster for rendering large pages)
3) The icon is ugly (but this is easily fixed with a trip to Xicons.

Plus, it kind of feels good to be using a piece of open source software. Not that I have ethical issues with commercial, closed-source stuff (heck, I hope to one day be rich because of it). But Mozilla is a solid browser that’s stable and consistent across platforms. IE can’t make that claim.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll switch back in another three years.

Microsoft accidentally distributes the Nimda worm to Korea. According to the article: Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers when it distributed Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, the company acknowledged Friday.

I’m getting more and more into REALbasic. What an awesome program! After struggling several times to learn how to write even the most rudimentary programs, I’m starting to make sense of object orientation. And it’s really cool.

Just heard that a girl in Etown strangled her one year old baby and left it in a dumpster. I just don’t have the restraint not to point out the unfairness that my son is dead because of a pre-natal virus and this girl murders her own child.

As of yesterday (June 16, 2002), I am an elder of Westwood Community Church. Big responsibility, lousy pay (that’s a joke).

In all seriousness, it’s an honor to be chosen for something like this. It makes me think a lot more about the church and our direction.

I’m beta testing a product called ideaSpiral. It’s pretty cool. When it’s released, I’ll post a link here.

It’s weird having a three year old child. She says the funniest things. The other night as supper she looks at me and says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I don’t know where she comes up with stuff. Actually, I realized later that that particular phrase is often repeated on PB&J Otter, but still.

The dog, on the other hand, never says anything intelligible. Just barks. Although there are times when I would give cash money to find out what’s going through his brain. He looks at me sometimes like he passionately wants to speak but can’t. Then he usually pees or does something equally endearing.

My good friend Bill and his wife visited last weekend. Bill was the best man in my wedding. His brother and his wife just lost a baby, about as far along as Jen and I were. My heart is broken for them, but I hope that I can somehow help. It’s been over a year and a half for us, and the sting is still there. It’s mostly not so bad, but there are times when it’s worse. This week, for example, I was asked on two occasions about my second child and had to tell people that he was stillborn. Invariably, people feel embarrassed and awkward at having asked, and they fall all over themselves to apologize, and they genuinely try to be helpful.

But it still stings. And I guess it always will.

I’ve heard it said many times that potty training is an almost instant thing when the child decides that it’s time. I’ve actually been reminding my wife of that for several months. Friday evening, Grace’s potty training switch flipped. She’s a big girl now.

The teachers are now officially gone at Etown. Now the summer begins and our work becomes absolutely insane. I get so annoyed at people who assume I have the summer off just because I work at a school. I guess they think the computer fairies are rebuilding servers, re-imaging labs, upgrading classroom computers, and installing new network hardware.

Hmmmm . . . I’ve written lyrics to three new songs tonight. Or this morning at this point, I guess. Maybe my four and half year case of writer’s block is finally over. Wouldn’t that be nice?

My dog must think I’m an idiot. I went downstairs after a thunderstorm last night to see if we had taken in any water (we didn’t). In the basement is our house mascot, a stuffed and mounted fox.

Now, I’m not a hunter. I have no ethical or moral issues with hunting, I just don’t have the heart for it. My dad got the fox many years ago. He was going to get rid of it in 1994 at a garage sale, but I took it home because it seemed kind of campy. From being stored in his basement and several of my basements through the years, he has earned the name Dusty.

So Dusty now dwells in my basement, which drives my dog Jack crazy. My basement is split into two halves, a partially finished section and a completely unfinished section. Dusty stays in the unfinished half, which is where I check for water (since there’s no seal or anything over there). Whenever we go into the basement, Jack goes nuts and scratches at the door that divides the two halves of the basement, just dying to get at Dusty.

Sometimes I have a little fun and pretend to make Dusty growl at Jack, which flips him out completely. Usually, I just try to calm him down and take him back upstairs.

This is why he thinks I’m an idiot. I can only imagine what’s going through the dog’s head. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you know there’s a freaking fox living in the basement!? Why won’t you let me get him? I can take him! Why are you holding me back? It’s a fox, don’t you understand??”